I agree and I'm guilty of creating what is effectively a heavily hyperlinked knowledgebase and calling it a wiki. Unfortunately, only a tiny majority will ever create or edit a page despite the incredibly low barrier of a web browser without minimal authentication.
From Ward Cunningham himself:
"A wiki invites all users—not just experts—to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki website, using only a standard 'plain-vanilla' Web browser without any extra add-ons."
"A wiki is not a carefully crafted site created by experts and professional writers and designed for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the typical visitor/user in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the website landscape."
---
Wikipedia is effectively a crafted site that is maintained by experts (or at the very least very knowledgeable amateurs who 'own' certain domains) designed for casual visitors. The idea of a Wiki is great but in practice I'm less confident it exists as envisioned.
I've been thinking about something in this space, actually... it feels like this is much more a UX/social problem -- in that a wiki can very much be modeled as a repo with a very permissive auto-merge bot (e.g. if PR only touches unprotected pages and user is registered, allow merge)
> it feels like this is much more a UX/social problem
It's not merely "like" that. That's what it is.
"Wiki" comes from the Hawaiian work for "quick". You spot an error, you click the button to change it, and the change is made. That's wiki.
"Open a pull request and get it approved" is not wiki. It's what the default collaboration model was before wikis and exactly why the wiki was invented (to replace it).
I find this really annoying too. A wiki is not a knowledge base. For some reason people into LLM's seem to have decided to call things wikis, I am guessing because they want the credibility wikis have.
From Ward Cunningham himself:
"A wiki invites all users—not just experts—to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki website, using only a standard 'plain-vanilla' Web browser without any extra add-ons."
"A wiki is not a carefully crafted site created by experts and professional writers and designed for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the typical visitor/user in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the website landscape."
---
Wikipedia is effectively a crafted site that is maintained by experts (or at the very least very knowledgeable amateurs who 'own' certain domains) designed for casual visitors. The idea of a Wiki is great but in practice I'm less confident it exists as envisioned.