How cool would it be if there was a shared symbol on every wiki, where people got to know that any place they see this symbol, they can click it and edit the page? How great would it be if we came to agreement on such a symbol in a bottom-up, wiki-way? We can have such a symbol.

The idea of a Universal Wiki Edit Button began at RoCoCo in Montreal. This inter-wiki project to first adopt version 0.1 involves participants from several wiki communities and wiki engines (more are welcome!). We think version 0.1 will define the metaphor to use, and that subsequent versions will expand on the visual appearance of the icon. If individual wiki communities can come together, with some symbolic unity (a common brand, in a way), intended to makes all stronger. More than that though, through shared actions and decision-making, the larger wiki community can become more self-aware. The strength of this larger community is also demonstrated though our ability to self-organize for a common aim. The following two sections are from the actual work-in-progress UniversalWikiEditButton document. Please join us!

Purpose

Just like the weblog community has the orange “radio waves” RSS icon , we want an easily-recognizable universal Edit This button. This is a movement to start the ball rolling. When this process succeeds, the participating wikis will include this edit button in some way. Just as the RSS icon evolved over time (……), we recognize that the UniversalWikiEditButton will also evolve over time. Rather than struggling to create a perfectly evocative button for version 0.1, we recognize our primary objective is quickly getting to wide deployment of a single icon that is good enough. This exercise will be a success when we can demonstrate the ability of the wider wiki community to self organize for collective action.

Principles

The following principles guided our selection of the 0.1 UniversalWikiEditButton and will inform our selection of version 0.2

• Compatible
• Language-independent
• Wiki-engine-independent
• Evocative of Edit
• Metaphorically Rich
• Professional
• Simple
• Skinnable
• Re-taskable

Sunday, 21st through Tuesday, the 23rd of October is WikiSym, an ACM conference co-located with OOPSLA in Montreal. WikiSym will be an ideal place to work further on the UniversalWikiEditButton, to unleash some wiki-creativity to move the process forward, hopefully concluding with a v0.1 UniversalWikiEditButton that wiki developers can add to their wikis.

Contributors: TedErnst, Obed Suhail