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When a wiki is not a wiki: twenty years of the Victorian Web: keynote

Published: 08 September 2008 Publication History

Abstract

All the chatter and puffery about Web 2.0 reminds those who have worked several decades in related fields of computing that the World Wide Web is essentially Hypertext 0.5: Ted Nelson, Vannevar Bush, Douglas Englebart, Andries van Dam, and other pioneering hypertext theorists all emphasized that true hypertext has to have to allow readers to write and link. Fortunately, with the coming of blogs and now wikis, the Web has at last begun to approach the vision of the hypertext pioneers. Therefore, after a brief look at the most useful paradigms for wikis --- that is, the best way for readers and writers to think about them --- we shall look at The Victorian Web, a site containing more than 38,000 documents and images, some of which date from 1988 --- long before the WWW took its present form. The four pre-web versions of the site used both full and partial read-write systems, and as the site took form, its webmaster and editors tried to employ the lessons learned from the earlier hypermedia systems to the WWW. We shall therefore look at how portions of the site have turned out to function much like a proto-wiki --- a dynamic hypermedia corpus that contributors continually grow --- and what kind of lessons the experience of working with the site has for owners and contributors of wikis.
  1. When a wiki is not a wiki: twenty years of the Victorian Web: keynote

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      WikiSym '08: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Wikis
      September 2008
      219 pages
      ISBN:9781605581286
      DOI:10.1145/1822258
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      New York, NY, United States

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      Published: 08 September 2008

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      WikiSym08
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      WikiSym08: 2008 International Symposium on Wikis
      September 8 - 10, 2008
      Porto, Portugal

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      Overall Acceptance Rate 69 of 145 submissions, 48%

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