Last year Google banned the word wiki from corporate headquarters when it released Google Sites. Google’s focus seemed to be, “wiki is just like any other website, let’s not confuse people, so let’s call our wiki system ’sites’”.
Now it looks like they have reconsidered. Not only is wiki now mentioned at Google Sites, they recently launched two new products with the word wiki in them (Sidewiki launched today). 
What is jarring is that neither resemble a wiki. Weird, ehh… SearchWiki is not a wiki and GigaOM says that Sidewiki is more like a ‘Universal Commenting System‘ – by allowing anyone to comment about any site. It is interesting that Google Sites is the most wiki-like, yet the one that doesn’t have wiki in the title.
Maybe they are distilling the concept of wiki down to the fact that you can edit anything. This is a great core concept of wiki, but certainly not the only one. For me, these are some fundamental elements of a wiki:
One of the core values in the wiki world, which AboutUs is part of, is AssumeGoodFaith. If we start from that value and look at Google’s pattern with the word wiki and the concept of wiki, what must this very smart company be trying to do? Any insights?
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great commentary – I’ve been wondering the same thing too – I had high hopes after the Jot Spot acquisition – i was hoping I could suddenly render Jot Pages with any of my Google Docs and achieve interlinking that way (and then some) – so far, I haven’t seen anything of the sort, and haven’t been pleased with Google Sites. Now to be fair this could be another case of Grand Central going incognito and surfacing as Google Voice! I still have my fingers crossed
Crossing my fingers also! I love Google voice – maybe we can help them turn their products into awesome wiki ones!
I agree with Mark that many of Wiki’s most valuable properties have been lost in some things Google calls Wiki.
Of course I benefit indirectly as my word becomes more about collaborative goodness and less about specific properties of that goodness. I won’t complain too loud.
Not entirely related, but I also thought it was interesting that Sidewiki is supported on Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, but not their own Google Chrome. I laughed a little when I read that.
Hopefully google can pull it together and make it less confusing for everyone.
Note that wordpress has implemented versioning on pages and posts (but not on comments — I don’t know starting when, but it’s been a while already).
Norbert – yea, WordPress has definitely got some wiki-ness to it. I tried to use the versioning on this post, actually. Something happened on publish and it was a version that was 10 versions ago or something – so I tried to cobble together the changes from the diffs of the post – it wasn’t as easy as wiki, so there is a ways to go yet. Happy people are pushing in the direction though!
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