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I'm at Wikimania, and it is the end of the second day. I listened to a keynote by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and invited talks by Ross Mayfield, founder of Socialtext, and Ward Cunningham, father of the wiki. If you missed the talks, make sure to come to WikiSym 2005, where all three of them will be on a panel about the future of wikis, next to giving talks.
On Friday, Jimbo (Jimmy Wales) started the conference with a short talk about the top ten things to free of its current limitations. This involves not only encyclopedic knowledge, but data, music scores as well as recordings, photos and video, and so on. Clearly, an inspiring vision for the future.
Later that day Jimbo was on a panel, together with journalists and politicians, talking about the "politics of wikipedia." What stuck most in my mind was a statement made by Isaac Mao about Wikipedia "being a disruptive technology to the Chinese political system." I interpreted this to mean that for many Chinese Internet users, the egalitarian editing process of wikis is a first (and defining) democratic experience, the consequences of which cannot be foreseen.
On Saturday, Ross talked about the business case for wikis in the enterprise space. It was a well received talk that made clear that wikis are now a full-blown enterprise software category. This means that it will be forming its own ecosystem. I just wonder why there aren't more competitors to Socialtext. Despite its commercial focus, the disruptive nature of wikis not just to the Chinese government but to corporations world-wide was apparent in this talk as well.
Finally, it was Ward's turn, and he spoke about the past, present, and future of wikis as he sees it. He showed how it all started with Apple's Hypercard application, how he developed an understanding of Hypertext, how CRC cards came of it, how the design pattern idea was formed, and how he invented the first wiki, all in a succession of doing and learning steps encompassing some 20 years of research.
On the creation of Wikipedia, he reported how Jimbo showed up on his wiki one day and asked whether the wiki concept could be used to develop an encyclopedia. Ward answered, saying that yes, you could do an encyclopedia, but then it would be less of an encyclopedia and more of a wiki. He asked who in the audience had seen that exchange, and many raised their hands to confirm it.
What sounds like a humorous anecdote not only gave rise to Wikipedia, but also hints at the disruptive potential of wikis to collaboration as we know it.
I strongly believe that embedded in the proper social processes, wikis can set free unprecedented collective intelligence. These processes are inherently democratic, can free us from top-down control, and hence are a formidable device for bettering the world, socially, culturally, and politically.
This may require a lot of work, but at the end it might as well lead to the peace nobel prize for whoever manages to pull it of.
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