I have accidentally spent some time recently reading wikis, and I ended in the WikiRevival page on Community Wiki:
Wiki movement is close to being dead. We all know that. One can only imagine how this wiki used to be years ago. Lively, pulsating. Something like that.
The page was last edited on 2021-08-23, so it is kind of fresh –sometimes is hard to know, you may read something that feels like it could have been written today, and it is 10 years old–.
As I understand it, the wiki movement refers to public wikis as a way of collaboration and as tool for building communities. And I wish I could say the rumours of its dead have been greatly exaggerated, but my anecdotal experience seems to confirm that public wikis aren’t at least as alive as they used to be.
In a way, we could say the same about blogs. Or more recently, forums. And before that mailing lists. And before that Usenet news groups. And depending on your age I guess we could go even further back.
I can hear you ask: what about the Wikipedia?
The page has more:
But what’s not dead? Atlassion (sic) Confluence (a proprietary product), WikimediaFoundation and wikis on wikifarms like Fandom (used to be Wikia) that describe modern media. Even wikis on services like GitHub or GitLab are not widely used.
So the Wikipedia is not what I think they meant with the movement.
Then it goes further and questions what features are required for a wiki engine to be successful today –e.g. mobile upport–, and what are the unresolved wiki issues. Obviously all this could be completely wrong, but it is an interesting read, and it ends with some optimism or at least hope that, with some small changes, wikis could be back to be.
I have always been fascinated by wikis. Or, should I say, the wiki movement that I didn’t experience. Not even back in early 2000s when I was active in my local Linux User Group, and it was standard to have a wiki. It had write permission restricted to the LUG members –that didn’t write much–. Sadly, it looks like we didn’t understand what was all about.