Summer 2026 Workshop/What is a Wiki
| Workshop session | |
|---|---|
| End Datetime | 2026-07-30T12:00:00.000Z |
| Attendee | Jonny, Samara |
| Description | What is a wiki, how is it different from other things, and why is this wiki in particular different from other wikis? |
| Title | What is a Wiki? |
| Led By | Jonny |
| Part Of | Summer 2026 Workshop |
| Session Type | Lecture |
| Start Datetime | 2026-07-30T11:30:00.000Z |
Obscene Basics
Functionally, a wiki is a loosely defined concept, but it's very simple:
- A **text-based** medium
- With **pages** as the unit of organization
- And **links** between the pages as structure
- With a very **permissive** editing model
- Supported by **edit history** as a first-class concept.
The specific technical description is less important than what the technology facilitates: in their unstructuredness, they invite structure, and allow a relatively unique kind of social-collaborative shared space.
the true power of wikis lies in the fact that they are a platform that provides affordances which allow for a wide variety of rich, multifaceted organizational structures. [...] "Providing tools and infrastructure mechanisms that support the development and management of policies is an important part of creating social computing systems that work."
Demoing
- Follow Thinking in Wiki
- Information about a thing goes on the page with that things name. Information about "protocols" goes on the Protocols page.
- All pages "already exist" - create a page by referring to it or going to it directly
- Show visual editor, and then relationship to raw syntax.
- By writing things down on simple, focused topics and linking between them already we have a pretty powerful thing, but we also need data
SMW
Semantic Mediawiki is a powerful combination of free text and structured data. These are typically separate tools: you have a database, and you have the documentation. SMW lets you do both, together, in an expressive and expansive way.
E.g. you have a bunch of information about your lab that typically exists nowhere, or else just floating along in the cracks of convention.
Say you have
- A Category:Project
- And a set of People who work on it
- And a number of times you have given Presentations on it.
- And a number of Protocols and guides that go along with it
- And some TODO items that are assigned to the people working on the project.
How would you typically keep track of
- "the presentations that person x has given on project y", or
- "the unfinished tasks within the project that relate to protocol z and are assigned to former members of the lab who have now left," or
- "what purchasing protocol and grant number can be used to purchase this kind of item for this project."
The usual answer is "you just remember it," but most technologies that try and respond to these kind of free-form, not-necessarily known in advance relationships between very heterogeneous information are either a) databases that need a lot of very specific tooling to fit into the natural flow of work, or b) now, i guess "AI" systems that are an opaque, asocial blob of surveillance where you can never actually be sure the information is correct.
A semantic wiki tries to bridge conflicting needs: informal, incomplete, unstructured natural language information with structured, computer-readable, queryable data.
Demoing
- Declare some property
- Query some property
- Group properties together with a template
- Expose those properties as a form
- Arrive at Semantic Schemas and a more general description about what, if anything, Labki is or may become.
References
- Mediawiki syntax docs
- Templating docs