Wikis then and now (Ward Cunningham)
From MapbenderWiki
Ward Cunningham talked about the history of the development of Wiki technology and how he was involved in it.
Starting off with a stack of cards and the experiences of how people could make very good use of these to organize their problems he implemented the very first Wiki-like hypertext system. The most intriguing feature was how easy it was for people to link several pieces of information together easily. Somehow "Wikistyle" translates well into "Fast&Easy".
His presentation will soon also be available in a not-so-closed format. ...get it now as HTML here: http://c2.com/doc/wikimania/Wikimania_files/frame.htm
The first half of his presentation was easy to follow, it was basically a walk through the history. Pushing on to present times he compared development of "his" Wiki to Wikipedia. He observed that activity (in number of edits and new pages) of his Wiki leveled out whereas Wikipedia's activity curve is still steepening. Nobody knows how step this curve might still get but there are limits even to Wikipedia's growth.
This fits in nicely with Jimbo's introductory keynote speach where he suggests that some of the goals of Wikipedia have alread been achieved (currently by the English, German and French Wikipedia - always only for that small share of people with access to the web, obviously!).
The last part of his talk really took off when he tried to figure out how peer to peer networks will evolve. Ward reckons that technologic evolution together with growing omnipresence of web access and connectivity will also (have to) change our way of thinking.
Our way of understanding collaboration has been influenced deeply by Wikis. Chances are high that Ward might also be right regarding influcences in future development of distributed, replicating or even morphing networks.
