Tag Archives: River of News

Three Wiki Questions for Dave Winer…

Posted on by

Hi Dave,

Have followed your work for perhaps as long as I’ve been online.

Your ideas and examples always leave me thinking, often lead me to experimenting.

However, the following Wiki-type-website questions have gnawed at me, kept me wondering “What’s Dave Winer’s take on this?”

( I don’t know if my above @TorontoWiki Tweets were a catalyst for your working with Ward Cunningham, so maybe that’s Question Zero ? )

Q. 1. Should a Wiki’s Front Page be a River of News instead of a directory style portal page?

You always urge/champion News Websites to make a River of News of their home page, above the fold, as it were.

Your best example/success might be The New York Times :

The Day NYT did so : http://scripting.com/stories/2009/05/12/markThisDay.html

Your original NYT River : http://scripting.com/rivers/nytimes/

NYT Times Wire : http://www.nytimes.com/timeswire/

In Wikis generally, The “Recent Changes” page by default is NOT the Front Page.

The wiki home page is often a manually crafted portal page more akin to 1990s netscape or perhaps akin to Craigslist’s main page.

Wiki pages by their nature are not blog posts.

Hence if there is no “announcement” of a wiki page’s creation, nor of its subsequent edits, how does one find out about them?

“Recent Changes”, sometimes re-labeled as Activity, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges

Or in my TorontoWiki case:

https://localwiki.org/toronto/_activity

The “Recent Changes” page feels like a River of News. It functions as an internal RSS Feed of newly created wiki pages.

At times, I’ve found a Twitter-like-refresh-addiction with visiting various Wiki websites’ “Recent Changes” tabs or pages.

Ward Cunningham’s Recent Changes Junkie page : http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RecentChangesJunkie

Q. 2. Is “The View From Nowhere” in journalism the same as Wikipedia’s “Neutral Point of View (NPOV)” ?

You blogged “How the View From Nowhere has crippled American journalism”

http://scripting.com/liveblog/users/davewiner/2016/02/29/1082.html

I recognize your and Jay Rosen’s VFN ideas in Wikipedia’s NPOV policy.

I don’t know if NPOV is crippling Wikipedia, but it goes a long way to excluding one’s opinions which are often found on blogs or silos instead.

Paradoxically, for an “open” website “which anyone can edit” then, this “Neutral Point of View” has been one of the things which make Wikis in general, and Wikipedia in particular, a type of closed Silo.

Q. 3. When are Comments on a Blog equivalent to Edits on a Wiki page?

Some blogs have comments, some do not.

Some Blog allow public commenting on a post by post basis.

Wiki edits sometimes are minor and are made without a summary comment.

Other times, the comment explaining why a wiki page has been edited is much, much longer than the edit itself.

By observing and borrowing from the Blog world’s prior art, I’ve been trying to understand when wiki pages should have Comments turned ON for individual wiki pages and when they should not.

Any thoughts?

Lastly, to lighten things up, in this election year, a timely debate about Blogs vs Wikis:

Thanks Dave.

HiMY