Wiki science/Future of Wiki

The first wiki, the WikiWikiWeb, was created in 1995 and wiki is thus a relatively young concept. Since 1995 the concept has evolved a lot. Wikipedia, where the concern for both layout and content can said to be a major breakthrough of the wiki concept to a larger public - as well as concerning media attention as the great number people cooperating.

The future of wiki is likely to be increasingly intertwined with the future of the internet. Here are some things that might benefit the future of wikis:

Blog and wiki

A weblog or blog is a website which contains periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts on a common webpage.

Weblogs have some similarities with wikis, in that they may stimulate community interaction, and some allow reader feedback. Weblogs do not generally permit readers to modify existing text, though some exist that do (see blikis, chat rooms).

A merging of blog and wiki technologies can be seen at Bloki.com.

.wiki

A .wiki domain name ..

.. Some dispute this since .net for internet provider companies and .edu are falling out of favor in favor of .com and .org. ..

.. However both .net and .edu are intended to provide information about the provider of information rather than a characteristic of the information itself. Thus arguably the .wiki/.wik Top Level Domain would provide information of far more value to a searcher. Another example might be a .pub TLD for public domain information or the .NFP (not for profit ad free)

A wiki of wiki

http://wikiindex.com

Topical interconnection between wikis

At the present time (October 2004) there is little but stylistic emphasis between different MediaWiki projects. However in the future as the need to present XML stored information in a variety of search and display styles become important, information will become static data and the means of presentation will vary.

Wikitext standard

Development and successful implementation of a wikitext standard including an interwiki link standard and an interwiki identity standard.

Mature software

More mature software environment allowing administrators to easily start a wiki

WYSIWYG?

Standard editing conventions or a more reliable WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)editing environment.

WikiCurricula?

Not to be confused with Wikiversity, a compendium of lesson plans, lesson resources and possibly audio and video collections of lectures, speeches, books, etc. Not limited to traditional academics (as Wikiversity implies), the WikiCurricula could include all schooling from pre-Kindergarten through elementary, secondary, college, technical school, special education, language education, adult education, etc.

Curricula could be searched by age/grade group, language of delivery, subject, additional media (audio, video, slideshow, etc) and other criteria. An exemplary model for consideration might be MIT's Open Courseware Initiative.

The name might not be WikiCurricula (WikiLessonPlans? WikiEducation?), but it is recommended not to be abbreviated to wikicula, which sounds dirty or like a gynecological instrument.

Wiki Life Cycle

An individual wiki may experience something akin to a biological life span or life cycle as suggested in this article on Meatball Wiki:

http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiLifeCycle

Future wiki features

The original wiki was a relatively quick hack, close to "the simplest thing that could possibly work". Well-meaning people have pointed out a huge number of things that are lacking. There is an entire wiki dedicated to listing new features for wiki.

Some of these proposed new features are likely to be implemented and tried out. However, some of these features will turn out to be counter-productive, and backed out of the wiki. It's quite possible that future websites may discover that removing even more features may make things easier to use or better in some other way.