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 499 pages, made through 4,804 edits, written by 33 contributors, of which 0 are considered active, and in the middle of 248 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

8 July 2025

20:16

User:Manetta‎ diffhist +13‎ Manetta talk contribs (→‎CC sysadmin)

N    20:16

Crowds‎ diffhist +654‎ Manetta talk contribs (Created page with "<blockquote> A public can also be a second thing: a concrete audience, a '''crowd''' witnessing itself in visible space, as with a theatrical public. Such a public also has a sense of totality, bounded by the event or by the shared physical space. A performer onstage knows where her public is, how big it is, where its boundaries are, and what the time of its common existence is. A '''crowd''' at a sports event, a con­cert, or a riot might be a bit blurrier around the ed...")

Who else has an account?

• Aldmilne talk contribs
• Chavezheras talk contribs
• Christianvonand talk contribs
• CodaMarooned talk contribs
• Crichlow talk contribs
• Decentral1se 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
• 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?

• 20:16, 8 July 2025 ‎Crowds (hist | edit) ‎[654 bytes] ‎Manetta (talk | contribs) (Created page with "<blockquote> A public can also be a second thing: a concrete audience, a '''crowd''' witnessing itself in visible space, as with a theatrical public. Such a public also has a sense of totality, bounded by the event or by the shared physical space. A performer onstage knows where her public is, how big it is, where its boundaries are, and what the time of its common existence is. A '''crowd''' at a sports event, a con­cert, or a riot might be a bit blurrier around the ed...")
• 15:08, 27 June 2025 ‎Wiki publishing chapter (hist | edit) ‎[10,280 bytes] ‎Manetta (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Wiki publishing 1. recent changes snapshots (check changes) 2. relearning from wikitext (edit source) 3. wiki printing as a practice (what links here) 1. 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 aesthet...")
• 14:38, 27 June 2025 ‎Technotextual editorial guidelines (hist | edit) ‎[10,273 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 reused 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...")
• 14:28, 13 June 2025 ‎Wiki printing (hist | edit) ‎[998 bytes] ‎Manetta (talk | contribs) (Created page with "''a page to collect traces of different wiki printing practices'' ==pmcwiki2print== * code: https://gitea.com/sandu/pmcwiki2print * discussion: https://bbs.permacomputing.net/thread/5/ A set of scripts that can be used to generate a printed version of the [https://permacomputing.net permacomputing.net] wiki. ==wiki-to/do-pdf== * in action: http://titipi.org/wiki-to-pdf/ * code: https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/titipi/wiki-to-pdf * context: https://titipi.org/wiki/inde...")
• 18:30, 26 May 2025 ‎Re-pairing (hist | edit) ‎[843 bytes] ‎Simoon (talk | contribs) (Created page with "In her essay [https://calibre.constantvzw.org/read/196/pdf "A Reparative Approach to Publishing"], Mia Melvær describes the shifting aspect of the written word, which once considered stable, is now within the age of digital publishing, editable and contested. Citing the example of the Wikipedia page that defines Femicide/Feminicide as one in "constant flux" between the edits of those who wish the page to represent the gendered nature of murders of women, and those who d...")

Which are pages yet to be made?

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

What are the 5 last files that have been uploaded?

Date	Name	Thumbnail	Size	User	Description	Versions
12:49, 17 June 2025	Constant-techno-disobedience-2023.pdf (file)		9.55 MB	Manetta		1
10:55, 17 June 2025	Octomode-technodisobedience-5.png (file)		490 KB	Manetta		1
10:55, 17 June 2025	Octomode-technodisobedience-4.png (file)		86 KB	Manetta		1
10:52, 17 June 2025	Screenshot from 2025-06-17 12-44-37.png (file)		6 KB	Manetta		1
10:31, 17 June 2025	Grilletti-epub-2.png (file)		23 KB	Manetta		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.