Jun 02, 2004
Wiki Design Principles
Oliver Wrede points to an unusually perceptive "using a wiki in my college classroom" postmortem by mphillip(?), who helpfully links back to Ward Cunningham's 11 wiki design principles, which provide a good framing device for talking about when and why one would use a wiki. I've quoted them below, with some commentary.
Open - Should a page be found to be incomplete or poorly organized, any reader can edit it as they see fit.
It is interesting that Cunningham includes a specific circumstances under which someone else's page should be edited. It reinforces the idea that the reader's editing power has to be bound by clear social practices. In the classroom, these practices have to be created and taught, which is not a bad thing, but it will take some time, effort, and a reasonably sophisticated understanding of the medium by the teacher.
Incremental - Pages can cite other pages, including pages that have not been written yet.
This is the big win for class oriented work. Sustained ongoing growth rather than constructing a final product. Weblogs are incremental, but not as interlinked; documents in a content management system tend to stand alone.
Organic - The structure and text content of the site is open to editing and evolution.
Actively restructuring a growing wiki is powerful and essential. But while it is far easier to reorganize a wiki than, say, a web site in a hierarchical file system, it still takes a certain kind of mind to do this kind of work. Your average 10th grade English teacher still probably doesn't feel up to untangling a class wiki. In practice, staying within the limitations of weblogs might be more practical.
Mundane - A small number of (irregular) text conventions will provide access to the most useful page markup.
Lord knows we need more applications in our classrooms that strive to be mundane. Just remember that those text conventions are probably harder to use than you think. When they don't work the way you expect, they're pretty opaque.
Universal - The mechanisms of editing and organizing are the same as those of writing so that any writer is automatically an editor and organizer.
This is something we should all be striving for in our classrooms.
Overt - The formatted (and printed) output will suggest the input required to reproduce it.
In practice, this only holds up for the simplest cases. Luckily 80% of your content will probably be simple. Unfortunately, teachers and students tend to want colors, sounds, etc.
Unified - Page names will be drawn from a flat space so that no additional context is required to interpret them.
This is extremely important, as most people don't know what a namespace is and can't easily wrap their brain around a heirarchy.
Precise - Pages will be titled with sufficient precision to avoid most name clashes, typically by forming noun phrases.
This convention must be taught.
Tolerant - Interpretable (even if undesirable) behavior is preferred to error messages.
Yes please. It is hard for wiki software to follow this rule for formatting problems.
Observable - Activity within the site can be watched and reviewed by any other visitor to the site.
Some wikis do this better than others. Use one that does it well. I have a recent wiki changes box on the front page of our school site.
Convergent - Duplication can be discouraged or removed by finding and citing similar or related content.
I don't know how this would work.
If that read as a point by point debunking of the utility of wiki's, it certainly wasn't meant to be. My message is that creating a wiki in a classroom will require a lot of active teaching. It won't just happen, and it won't be simple. It will probably be worth it, though.
And you can always bastardize wiki software and do useful things with it despite violating many of the principles above.
