Welcome to the new Wiki Gardener blog. A wiki gardener is someone who helps a wiki grow and thrive. As Sam Aparicio on the Social Text site explains:
One of the great things about a wiki is the way structure emerges organically. Rather than imposing rigid “top down” hierarchies, taxonomies, and ontologies a wiki enables people to organize ideas and conversations in ways that make sense to them. The structure emerges and over time, and is constantly evolving. Like any organic process, however, it can be messy. There will be duplicate pages with slightly similar names, links to nonexistent pages, pages that aren’t linked to, and so on. So it’s helpful to do a little “gardening”–pruning, tending, and cleaning up the wiki as it grows. The objective of good gardening is to lend the wiki some shape, but not kill it with rigid rules or taxonomies.
The purpose of this blog is to document the ongoing projects, discussions, thoughts, and ideas for helping the UBC Wiki become a useful and valuable tool.
Most gardening in the real world is not done as a solitary project. Instead, gardening can be done with friends, colleagues, groups, or communities. Likewise, a successful Wiki is a community project. We hope you’ll help garden and a great way to do that is to drop us comments on this blog or on the WikiAdmin discussion page.
Welcome to you as well! Things are looking better already.
Thanks Brian! I’m sure I’ll be bugging you shortly as I think about organizing some of the content you have contributed to the wiki. By the way, I enjoyed reading your blog postings on the Murder, Madness, & Mayhem Wikipedia project.