"…Something Wiki-like is going to end up being a part of every Internet property. I think the Internet is a communication vehicle and one-way broadcast communication is just not as interesting as it once was, so…there'll be Wiki aspects in everything. And there'll come a day when people won't even call it Wiki anymore, it'll just be how we work. At that point, the transition will be complete."
00:29
That is Walt Cunningham, the man who started the wiki movement 12 years ago. Well if you're not entirely sure what a Wiki actually is, then this is about the only time I can get completely journalistically lazy and simply lifting a definition straight out of the Wikipedia. It says that a Wiki is a collaborative web site which can be edited by anyone with access to it.
00:49
Well, Caroline Gluck doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, I've checked, but she can be defined as a BBC correspondent based in Taipei, the Taiwanese capital. She's just been to a major Wiki event there. And earlier, she told me more about it.
01:03
-CG: "There's been a, an annual meeting of Wikimania which the annual conference of the Wiki media foundation, basically technicians, practitioners, developers, programmers of free online content on the Internet have been meeting, talking about development on the Internet, and the way forward.
01:23
Wikimania is getting pretty well-known, but a lot of people were telling me that it's still pretty much the domain of techies, geeks and idealists and they wanted to move away from that sector to really become part of the main stream."
01:39
And it seems as if maybe they have a way to go, and I'm sure we'll get to talk about that. But first you heard I suppose a little bit more about the present day situation from Walt Cunningham, didn't you?
01:47
CG: "Yes, I think practitioners like Walt are still quite idealistic about how they want Wiki to develop. They love the idea of having this very active collaborative effort on the Internet rather than individuals hacking away, working on their own. It's very much this idea of a community cooperating together, but that absolute goal is still a goal a vision at the moment while Wikipedia, which is the best known Wiki, gets about 200 million readers a month and that's pretty huge.Many other wiki sites are very small indeed, so I asked him, a decade on, just what the challenge was for wiki now.
02:28
WC: Oh I think it's barely scratched the surface, frankly. I think that Wiki is a very simple software, the fact that it works at all, what we can learn most from that now, is that people really have a deep felt need to collaborate. I think that there's a lot of assumptions about how people work, about what value they have to offer that's a rudimentary, early industrial attitude about work, and we are at a point where the general population has to escape from those assumptions and that Wiki was a safe way for many people to try their hand at that. I know a lot of people wring their hands about who are these people writing the history of the world in Wikipedia, but I think of it much more positively, here are people who are maybe for the first time in their lives realizing that it's just being a human being that they have the ability and maybe then the responsibility to contribute to our collective future."
03:33
Walt Cunningham there. So, Caroline, citizen journalism inevitably must have been high on the agenda there as well.
CG:"Yes definitely. Many people had got together. They were discussing how the public can generate their own news content and can edit and add to sites already on the net. That is proving, I think, something of a challenge to the traditional media out there. But many of these so-called citizen journalist sites are still in their infancy, I was talking for example to two people in Taiwan, One worked for a public television system that have set up their own citizen journalism platform, and the other worked for global voices online, which is one of the biggest worldwide collaborative journalist sites. But both of them admitted to me they were really in the early stages. The sites were almost getting more media attention including the traditional media, than public attention, so there's still a long way to go there as well, before the public really get involved in a very mainstream way."
04:37
And aside from the Wiki foundation, there're all kinds of offshoot wikisites around now as well then, are there?
04:42
CG " Yeah, I think a lot of people are pretty interested in using the open source software and creating their own websites. One very successful one and probably the most successful wiki site after Wikipedia is called Wikihow. It was set up in January 2005, but it's a for profit business and it gets about 5 million hits a month so that's actually pretty big. Now the founder of that is Jack Herrick. I talked to him at the conference. He was saying that sites like his are going to be quite a challenge for the more traditional internet business models, those that he thinks are somewhat exploitative of the people who use them."
05:23
JH:"We built it entirely with the mission and the community in mind, and the way we guarantee that the for-profit company always acts in their best interest is by having everything … forkable. And what I mean by forkable is all of our software is opensource , all of our content is open content. So, we provide a URL which has all our current software that we've built internally, and provided available for anyone. It's available online now, you can check online now if you want to see how we do our internal coding, and so what happens is if Wiki held a company and started doing things which are not in the best interests of the users, the community has the power to fork Wikihow, and move it, take it away from me, and move it to another web site and maybe make it a not-for-profit project, and continue running it without me."
06:05
That was Jach Herrick. So finally Caroline, how much discussion was there about bringing Wiki into the main stream now?
CG:"Well, there was quite a lot of discussion, as well as a lot of technical discussions about syntaxes and programs and things that frankly made my head spin. But I think everybody involved really wants this whole experiment to take off in a much more mainstream way. At the moment Wikipedia as I said earlier is probably the best used site, but as Jack Herrick said, it's just one book in the whole library, it's an encyclopedia. And Jack wants every book to be online and to be accessible for users to generate their own content. And I think the big challenge for people now is to have to make the technology almost easier ore user-friendly, making Wiki something that the mainstream will use. I think the other thing is, that they wanted to really be accessible and open to everyone at every level at the moment it's very much still a male dominated user generated content, a lot of the techs and geeks are men, and the goal I think is simply to make it something that everybody at all levels of society can use including women, people of all ages, and that in the future we won't be thinking 'Oh I'm using a wiki site!', we'll simply be using it without thinking twice about it".
A view to the future there, from Caroline Gluck, who was speaking to me earlier from Taipei.