Thoughts on Introducing the Wiki

It was my intention to present with the launch of the Cyborg Institute website, a wiki that would serve as a forum to present the product of the research that I hope will become one of the, if not the most important aspects of the Cyborg Institute's work.

Establishing a wiki is a non-trivial project, that involves many hours of work to work with contributors, to research and write "seed content," to get the software setup and configured for the needs of your community, and every community, every wiki, is different. Indeed one aspect of what we do is to figure out how individuals and groups can establish wiki's in their unique settings.

I've written "seed text," a partial substrate really, of what I envision for this wiki. I've outlined my intentions for initial work, and posed--in the relevant pages--questions that I hope to be able to explore and answer in the wiki in the coming months and years. In all, I'm proud of what I was able to write, and believe that it's a good beginning.

The more I worked on it, however, the more I started to realize that my goal of launching the wiki's "seed" when I launched the rest of the Cyborg Institute website was a flawed goal. The wiki is a massive project, wikis are always massive projects that can't just be "whipped out" in a week or two by a single prolific writer. I ran into all sorts of challenges: areas that I knew I needed to cover where my knowledge was limited, software that I couldn't get to work quite right, subjects that I felt belonged in the wiki that aren't part of the Cyborg Institute's focus on Information Management. While I continued to feel that the Wiki was essential to what I was hoping to accomplish here, I also felt that waiting for it to be "done," even in a provisional sense, was counterproductive to the goals of all the other projects of the Cyborg Institute.

To bring us to the present, I decided to launch the Cyborg Institute website with a wiki that isn't even provisionally complete. However, as incompleteness is the usual state of wiki's I see no harm in publishing the ciwiki in its present form. With a few disclaimers and caveats:

• Most importantly, there is no (functional) web-based interface for editing the wiki at the present. All edits to the wiki must be submitted over the ?git interface.

• There are many fundamental, "core pages" that are incomplete, or uncreated even in "stub" format. Without (working) web-based editing, the traditional "red link" or "?EditMe" question mark is absent from this generation of the wiki.

• The existing content is (primarily) written by me (Sam) as a starting place, and thus doesn't (yet) represent any sort of peer-reviewed, collaborative output. I encourage us all to view this as a work in progress.

With those concerns in mind, what follows is my original introduction/index page. Enjoy and I look forward to working with you.

— ?Sam Kleinman, 16 April 2009