Weblog and wiki rhetoric

Weblogs and wikis are very similar in some ways. Weblogs force the reader’s attention to new posts. Wiki denizens check “recent changes” addictively to see what’s been added or changed.
But there’s a key difference in genre. With weblogs, it’s considered bad form to revise. Blog readers monitor RSS feeds, and pounce when their newsreader tells them that someone has adjusted a story after publishing it.
Wiki pages are designed to be revised. Classic wikis, like Ward’s Wiki, and Meatball Wiki accrete and polish entries over time.
Weblogs foster amnesia. There’s a relentless push for novelty, at the expense of thinking more deeply about old ideas. This weblog really wants to be a wikiblog, so I can post new ideas, and then go back, add content, improve writing, add references.

9 thoughts on “Weblog and wiki rhetoric”

  1. i feel the same! in some ways it is against practice (in a blog format) to re-edit past entries… but it would be handy. i like the MT interface on the backend for example.
    a thing i thought of is to create a side bar list of ‘recent changes’ which would include the last modified of all posts, this would be very cool.
    well, forget side bar, you could organize the entire site like that… but as with wikis- things in recent changes appear to have some bouyancy, and they seem to stay on top for a while.

  2. Even if one is willing to break the blogger’s taboo against revision (I do it all the time), there’s still a big difference between blogs and wikis: blogs are *organized* chronologically. (That’s a different question from whether the content is subject to revision or not.) The chronological structure is no doubt better for some purposes, worse for others, and for a wide range of applications in the middle it probably just depends on what you’re used to.
    Ed V raised a similar question over at Vacuum: http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2004/06/on_the_relation.html
    By the way, the common-sense reason behind the taboo may simply be that in a blog that offers comments, you don’t want to make your commenters look like idiots by changing the context in which they posted their replies. Wikis must have similar issues but address them differently. The archetypal blog resembles a conversation, while the archetypal wiki resembles collaboration on a document. But it’s not uncommon for them to trade places. Some of my blog entries have become crudely FAQ-like as Google-driven commenters add to them over the years, while some of the entries in the Vacuum Wiki are pretty conversational. If you took away the user interface, an observer might be hard put to tell which was which.

  3. As a *low-traffic* blogger, I figure it won’t hurt too much if I revise. I try to revise before posting but as soon as it goes up into the *light of day*, I see places I would like to revise. So I try to revise quickly before everyone has had a chance to read it. If I want to make further changes other than spelling corrections, I usually put in a new paragraph and head it something like *UPDATE 6/12/04* or something. At this stage, without a big audience and few commenters, I figure it’s one of the benefits of being *small*.
    One of the biggest advantages of blogs is that additions are flagged for everyone and called *posts*. I’m probably breaking the rules, but I grant myself a bit more freedom when I feel I can add value to the post for all the people who read the post later.

  4. What you are also talking about is the problem of threads. in wiki we call it ThreadMode – and it means that we can’t refine the threads. So there is more noise than content at times.
    some wiki try to work in DocumentMode which is what you explain above…
    😉

  5. What you are also talking about is the problem of threads. in wiki we call it ThreadMode – and it means that we can’t refine the threads. So there is more noise than content at times.
    some wiki try to work in DocumentMode which is what you explain above…
    😉

  6. I don’t think it is impossible to refactor thread mode — it is a question of timing.
    It is certainly rude to refactor thread mode in the middle of a lively conversation. But once the conversation has died down, it is very useful to refactor the conversation, summarizing the issues, and preserving relevant opinions.
    (This, btw, is a revisiting of the editorial style of the Talmud, the classic work of Rabbinic literature, which edited together conversations that happened over 100s of years.)

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