Smelling like a wiki

Writing

In a wiki, writers become contributors, shifting the understanding of what writing can be from a traditional understanding of an individual (genius) author, towards someone contributing to a distributed practice of writing text.

This text is written in a wiki with 540 pages, made through 5,298 edits, written by 35 contributors, of which 0 are considered active, and in the middle of 266 uploaded files. We're writing in the WikiEditor, which is the simple text editor that is enabled by default when you install a new MediaWiki instance. I had to check the Special:Version page to find the name of this text editor.

Who else has been around on this wiki recently?

List of abbreviations:

N

This edit created a new page (also see list of new pages)

m

This is a minor edit

b

This edit was performed by a bot

(±123)

The page size changed by this number of bytes

3 December 2025

			14:43		Finances‎‎ 2 changes history +33‎ [Manetta‎ (2×)]
					14:43 (cur | prev) +23‎ Manetta talk contribs
					14:42 (cur | prev) +10‎ Manetta talk contribs (→‎CC income)

Who else has an account?

• Aldmilne talk contribs
• Chavezheras talk contribs
• Christianvonand talk contribs
• CodaMarooned talk contribs
• Crichlow talk contribs
• Decentral1se talk contribs
• Femke talk contribs
• Freja Kir talk contribs
• Geoffcox talk contribs
• Ingaluchs talk contribs
• Integloerich talk contribs
• Jack talk contribs
• JackWilson talk contribs
• Jung-Ah talk contribs
• Klb talk contribs
• Magda talk contribs
• Manetta talk contribs
• Mara talk contribs
• Mateus talk contribs
• MediaWiki default talk contribs
• Menotti talk contribs
• NWess talk contribs
• Nnsshh talk contribs
• Ooooo talk contribs
• Pold talk contribs
• RRA talk contribs
• Sandy talk contribs
• Sfoerster talk contribs
• Shusha talk contribs
• Simoon talk contribs
• Siusoon talk contribs
• Teodora sinziana talk contribs
• Teodorasinziana talk contribs
• Timcowlishaw talk contribs
• Xenodata talk contribs
• Xenodata-A talk contribs

What were the latest pages that were made?

• 14:15, 3 December 2025 ‎Making HTML snapshots of Cobbled Pads for OSP (hist | edit) ‎[812 bytes] ‎Manetta (talk | contribs) (Created page with "<syntaxhighlight lang="bash"> # how to use this script? # bash ./getcobbledpad.sh padname PADID="cobbled-pad-$1" APIKEY="aabac91dd54ef9e36aa7fc6e015556017ceb6b8398024cadff840ed69110a8c9" echo "Getting the latest revision of: $PADID" LATEST=$(curl -s "https://cc.practices.tools/pad/api/1.2.15/getRevisionsCount?apikey=$APIKEY&padID=$PADID" | jq -r ".data.revisions") echo "This pad has this amount of revisions: $LATEST" echo "Downloading the content of: $PADID" curl -s "...")
• 09:08, 30 November 2025 ‎Default pad text (hist | edit) ‎[663 bytes] ‎Manetta (talk | contribs) (Created page with "<pre> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This pad is hosted by CC (creative crowds), a server that we share for doing collective research on the entanglements of tools, cultures and infrastructure. How can this server be available AND unstable, public AND being paid for, free to be used AND situated, a production environment AND in transformation? While surfing the contradictions, we are formulting collective guidelines for...")
• 14:49, 29 November 2025 ‎Finances (hist | edit) ‎[2,496 bytes] ‎Manetta (talk | contribs) (Created page with "This is a collective log of our finances.")
• 15:23, 25 November 2025 ‎Working with what's there (hist | edit) ‎[2,110 bytes] ‎Simoon (talk | contribs) (Created page with "If we consider design to be a collaborative activity of world-building (and not just problem-solving), how to think about the materials, entities, and groups that are there to work with? What does it mean to ''work with material that is already there''? What does this bring to a design practice? I'm trying to articulate this in writing on this page. Here is a place to start gathering thoughts around these topics: * starting from the middle * material dialectics * subs...")
• 22:50, 21 November 2025 ‎Technotextual editorial guidelines for wiki layout practices (hist | edit) ‎[9,925 bytes] ‎Manetta (talk | contribs) (Created page with "== Technotextual editorial guidelines for wiki layout practices == ''Wiki software has an attitude! The following are a set of handles to be used as guidelines during a conversation between editor-designers and design-editors at the start of a publishing project, to shape the editorial workflow together.'' Open questions: * the scope of this document: focus on wiki-to-print or wiki-layout practices (which includes websites, printed publications, ...) * do we want to in...")

Which are pages yet to be made?

Flat‏‎ (3 links), Inkscape‏‎ (3 links), Paged.js‏‎ (3 links), ReportLab‏‎ (3 links), Scribus‏‎ (3 links), Weasyprint‏‎ (3 links), 8 years of Médor, CSS Regions and OSPKit‏‎ (1 link), CTRL+P zine‏‎ (1 link), Conversation with Lucile for the web2print library‏‎ (1 link), Non-linearity‏‎ (1 link), Publishing-as-environment‏‎ (1 link), Radio interview with Julien Bidoret & Quentin Juhel‏‎ (1 link) and Radio interview with Paged.js‏‎ (1 link)

What are the 5 last files that have been uploaded?

Date	Name	Thumbnail	Size	User	Description	Versions
14:02, 3 December 2025	So-you-decided-to-make-a-zine-in-octomode.pdf (file)		1,003 KB	Manetta		1
16:21, 25 November 2025	Varia-darktimes-sticker-on-laptop.jpeg (file)		303 KB	Simoon		1
16:20, 25 November 2025	Varia-darktimes-sticker-sheet.jpeg (file)		327 KB	Simoon		1
17:34, 14 November 2025	Dandelion-octomode.svg (file)		279 KB	Simoon		1
14:42, 14 November 2025	Wiki-to-print.gv.svg (file)		7 KB	Manetta	still very wip	1

And who contributed to this page?

...

Rendering layout

Wiki-to-print as a practice

Wiki-to-print is part of a broader interest in making publications using code and layout engines, instead of canvas and GUI based tools, as it allows us to work in collective modes and explore what this means, while being entangled with other communities of practice through the open standards (HTML and CSS) and tools (Mediawiki, Paged.js) we use. This means that books are being generated through scripts, newspapers rendered from multiple networked sources, or zines written HTML and CSS.

Using a wiki as an editing-design environment shifts multiple things around. What we currently refer to as wiki-to-print or wiki-layouting [i think we need a cute catchy name!] is actually a genealogy of practices of generating publications through a wiki. The trail includes work done at Constant in Brussels, Open Source Publishing in Brussels, the making of the book Volumetric Regimes in between Barcelona-Brussels-London-Rotterdam by Possible Bodies and Manetta Berends, the setup at The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI) by Femke Snelting and Martino Morandi in Brussels, the book Making Matters made by Hackers & Designers in Amsterdam, the making of the research newspapers Toward a Minor Tech and Content/Form with Geoff Cox, Christian Ulrikson, Winnie Soon and Varia/CC represented by Simon Browne and Manetta Berends in London-Rotterdam-Berlin. In all these occasions, wiki is used as a shared place for materials, editorial work and the making of the layout. Writing and design work can happen in a non-linear way and evolve parallel to each other, which invites to rethink editorial production workflows. Publications can be re-rendered over time, embracing the changes and transformations that might have emerged in between now and the previous edition. The versioning tracker and features like transclusion challenge traditional notions of authorship and modes of writing. Often a wiki becomes a rich messy archive and plays an important role as community infrastructure.