A recent article on News.com by Dan Farber (see link below) points out that Google has banished the word wiki from their offices as they rebranded their wiki acquisition company Jot Spot and launched it as Google Sites last week.
Although I do share the vision of an editable web with Google, I am feeling the importance of wiki culture being neglected by them. In their effort to mainstream the technology there is an important loss of culture, TheWikiWay. Are AssumeGoodFaith, Transparency, and other wiki specific collaborative ideals, inherent in the word wiki, to be reinvented as well? Shouldn’t Google embrace wiki fully, rather than recreate the wheel, or is this their vision:
Google is missing a lot of the point by not embracing the thirteen year old culture of wiki. Besides the seven year old culture Wikipedia, you have communities at Wikitravel, wikiHow, Wikipatterns, Wikia, Wikinvest, XWIKI, Wikispaces, fluwiki, WikiIndex and a whole host of others not mentioned here.
I hope that people will just say “Google’s wiki application, they call it Google Sites”. The younger generation knows it:
(via Ikiw.org post via BlacksGoneGeek.blogspot.com post via News.com post)
Other folks have pointed out this issue as well: Google launches its name without Wiki (google translated from French) and Don’t call it a wiki: Google Sites finally launches
What is Google trying to do here? Does anyone have any idea?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
So true! I think the problem with losing the name “wiki” is that then the site managers can ignore the 13 years of experience the wiki community has. For example: “It’s a good idea on wikis to let people have a front porch where they describe themselves.” The response: “Yes, that may be a good idea _on_a_wiki_, but we’re not a wiki, so we’ll ignore that advice.”
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. I think all people working on wikis are part of the WikiOhana — whether they know it or not, whether they want to be or not. But I think organizations and individuals that know about and embrace the Ohana will benefit from our collective wisdom more than those who turn away from it.
Nice XSite logo.. Maybe Joe Kraus should have used it instead of JotSpot.. It would have been closer to his former startup Excite