Wiki publishing chapter

Wiki publishing

recent changes snapshots (check changes)

So, if I remember correctly... We were interested in questioning what making layouts is with a wiki. And thinking less about the cosmetic aesthetics of wiki layouting and diving into the structural aesthetics of a wiki as a layout engine. What do you mean with cosmetic aesthetics? Layout is generally understood as an arrangement of graphic elements on a page, but we started to realise that the writing of the wiki pages would create a structure and how this was somehow invisibilized when making printed matter with a wiki. So for example, that there are so many different versions of a wiki page, all stored in the version tracker, that become invisible. And also other things, like hyperlinks that can't be clicked anymore, or red links. This realisation came through making the APRJA newspaper, when we were thinking about which article should be on which page and the cosmetic aesthetics started to take over: the thinking about the size of the title or the text itself, or how it was positioned next to visual material took the overhand. The fact that there were many people in the room writing wiki pages was something that did not find a place in the layout. At the same time, we asked them to follow a specific structure in their pages, a structure that we needed to make the layout, such as the specific order of the title and authorname, how they made bibliographic references, and also the practical thing of adding a specific category to their page so we could find their pages on the wiki.

To me, layout is not only spatial, it also needs structure. When you generate layout from code, you always work from structure. When you write a document in a word processor, you also use structure, on a textual level. Like, headings, bold, italic, lists, block quotes, all those things. But when you generate layout through code, you don't only have the textual structure, but the text comes with paratextual structure. Can you say more about that? Such as, all the metadata that gets generated by the version tracker that is built into the wiki, information about other pages edited by the same author, other pages that were edited around the same time... The structural approach doesn't stay within the page. The page itself is not the only place that holds structure. There is a lot of structure that comes from the writing environment, which in this case is the wiki. And so the question is, can this structure also find a place within the layout? Or what are other ways to experiment with this?

At the same time, the wiki software that we are exploring is not only providing these programmed layers of information, the software itself also comes with an idea about ways of writing, and attitudes towards writing, and a certain form of sociality. It's not only the programmed stuff that comes out, but it also invites you to engage with the writing differently. In a wiki, everything is a page, you can use that space for whatever you want. I've seen students using it for a text adventure game engine, as a slow async chat environment, as a place to store code, photogalleries, diary entries and journaling, essay writing, or to write practical tutorials. The wiki is not really restricting a type of writing that it can hold. But this is in situations where people are writing wiki pages for themselves or for friends, either in the context of education (like XPUB) or in self-organised cultural initiatives (like Varia).

Do you ever edit Wikipedia? Never. Me neither. I think there's something about stepping into that space that feels difficult.. it's a contested space, there is a lot of ownership. I'm afraid to write something personal that would be edited for reasons that are very distant to me, and i would not have any say about it. That's interesting, actually, it reminds me of something Michael (Murtaugh) said that the wiki is actually a hyper-authored space, because all the changes are tracked, which means that if someone wanted to monitor them, they can. And of course on Wikipedia, there are people who are monitoring those changes for a reason. But it's funny because we have used the same tools to look at the latest changes made on a wiki, but with a very different intention.

How would you describe that intention? Well, when we started to look at the recent changes page of monoskop.org, we were interested to understand the dynamics of that specific wiki, also to understand its current state and focus points. And when we were there and looked at the recent changes, of course, without surprise, found many edits made by Dusan. And because we know that Dusan is the main person running and editing monoskop, this was not really a surprise. But it was nice to see how the different edits he made that day, all seemed to link to each other. I'm just looking now to see which specific changes... It included edits made on a page called Ljubljana, which was followed by edits to the page BioTechna, followed by edits to the page Marc Dusseiller, which we then were curious about how they connected to each other. Yes, I started to wonder why Dusan is making edits on this day at this time. If you go to the frontpage of Monoskop.org you see a Mastodon feed and it kind of reminded me of this temporality of micro-blogging, where updates come in to the minute. So does the wiki editor then think, i must go and update my wiki? Ah you mean, after seeing a post on social media? Yes. Yes, I'm curious about what triggers Dusan to make or edit wiki pages (haha). It seemed to be closely related to his day-to-day surroundings, or the things he sees around him. But how can he see all these things? He must be the spider overlord!

What was interesting to you about the snapshots that we made? First of all, that they did not conform to the usual top-to-bottom and left-to-right reading of a page layout. Because we were using graphviz, which is a very unorthodox page layout tool, we did not have or ask for much control over the hierarchy of information. And we used colors to indicate what were pages, what were the times the pages were edited and to indicate who edited them. In a way, it kind of reminded me of reading the age of a try from concentric circles. It was more like a slice, rather then a snapshot. And yeah, i had to think about a different way to read layout, but diagrams generally do this, they ask you to read things in many different ways. It was interesting how when going through the process of making the diagrams and engaging with the MediaWiki API to do so programmatically, we had to work with the way of thinking about pages that comes with the MediaWiki software. It meant that we had to approach wiki pages as collections of revisions. Which in itself, I find there is something poetic there that really interests me. It's about re-visioning and re-visioning and re-visioning. For instance, you couldn't just ask for a page and get its content, but instead we were first pushed to ask for a page and then be explicit about which revision of that page we wanted access to. And after finding that particular revision, that was also how we could find who was the author of that revision, and the time that the revision was made. So the revision was really the central way to approach pages, the focus. Also, authors were referred to as "contributors", which aligns with this thinking of revisions instead of pages, because it shifts the focus to reworking material that is already there.

Was there something about the time as well? The word "recent" came up. How did we determine what was recent? For us what could be recent is something that happened in the last day, or the last week. And of course in the wiki you can list all the changes that were made in a certain amount of time. But we had to decide on a particular understanding of "recent" when making this snapshots, and we settled on a day. Because in a snapshot, you can't put more to it, it's fixed. What do you mean? The snapshot is a frozen moment in time. So if you want to add more to it, you need to expand the definition of what you think is recent.

It's funny that you use the word snapshot again. I like slice a lot more now. Time slices! Snapshot comes from photography, but also from the practice of taking photographs.

We tried to look at a few different wiki's, one's that are close to us, including monoskop.org, the XPUB wiki of the Piet Zwart Institute, TITiPI's wiki, the wiki4print wiki and our own CC wiki. Why did we do that again? I think because we wanted to look at a range of wiki's that have different purposes and audiences and also different frequencies of edits. But also, the reason to choose those that were close to us is because we knew the culture of these wiki's, or we would know the people who are editing it, which would not be the case at Wikipedia for instance. This would give us a sort of understanding of the time slices we were making. They were more familiar to us. And because we would be more familiar to use we would be able to make more accurate inferences, like what's inferred by what we see. Do you remember any other reasons? I don't remember other reasons for why we chose these particular wikis, but I did feel like visualising a layer of the wiki that in print stays invisible. But that, actually, is full of very suggestive information. It feels like its a place that leaks a bit of the day-to-day reality of the people editing it into a layout. It just leaks. Which I understand can't always take place in a printed publication. But it would reveal something about the way in which a publication was made. Of course I switch now to thinking about using a wiki for publication making, but I guess that was what we were trying to look for. What the printing of this particular layer of the wiki could mean. And it turned into a kind of wiki culture form of studies. Ah yes we had a word for this! We called it an ethnographic technotext.

relearning from wikitext (edit source)

We started by thinking about all the things that disappear when you print a wiki page. We also started to think about what we could pass on to other people using wiki's to do print work.