Blikis Blokis and other animals

Introduction

This week in Interactive System Design we have been asked to consider ways of integrating a Blog and a Wiki. In this article I will discuss what I believe is a sensible approach to combining the individuality of a Blog and the community support of a Wiki.

Background

Blogs and Wikis are in essence two opposing forces on the internet. Blogs are a very personal expression by an individual about a topic they find interesting or worthy of comment. Blogs create a strong sense of ownership of the article content and ofen closely reflect the views of the author. Wikis are community driven sites which enable the accumulation, distillation, purification and dissemination of information through a community driven effort. Each article is open to modification by anyone in the community so there is no feeling of ownership and Wikis often frown upon the inclusion of strong personal views.

Below I quickly outline the current state of Blogs and Wikis.

Blog

The phrase Blog is short for web log an online diary where people can post their own texts for other people to read. Blogs are most commonly used by individuals to communicate thoughts, ideas and experiences important to them. As such they are highly opinionated and usually unbalanced.

LiVEJOURNAL is a great example of a community of personal bloggers who can build up friendship networks and share public and private thoughts between each other.

Blogs have now grown up and evolved beyond their original roots. Major companies now use, in an indirect way, the popularity of blogs to reach out to their communities. Particularly in the electronic entertainment field blogs have become the primary weapon of choice in the battle for mind and market share.

Wiki

Wikis came to the public attention a few years back with the establishment of Wikipedia. Wikipedia embodies the community spirit Wiki was designed to capture. Wikis are designed to allow huge numbers of people to contribute to the content of a web site.

The theory goes behind Wikis states that by allowing everyone to add and modify content on a site the accuracy of the content can be improved. By using community editing it is hoped that individual biases are removed through continuous editing of the article by different people. While this is generally true Wikis also suffer from many forms of cyber vandalism. To combat these issues features like moderation, page locking and access limitations are used by a selected number of trusted site users. Depending on the size of the web site these team of moderators can be very significant.

Synergy

Most online resources that discuss the synergy of Blogs and Wikis really tend to look at a Bliki as simply making a Blog editable by (a possibly limited group of) other people. For example see the Wikipedia Bliki page.

While the blog owner creates the initial article there is limited control above and beyond the standard features available in a Wiki to maintain and control where the article and links go from their initial starting point.

A New Hope

My proposed implementation is significantly different from the synergy described above. I propose to create a Blog system with Wiki elements which reproduce the change tracking features available in many word processors. Below is a chart which shows the benefits I expect this system to bring, and the potential drawbacks. Later in this article I will discuss why I believe that some of these drawbacks can be largely negated in a learning community environment.

Benefits

• Author retains ownership of article
• Author retains overall control of content and direction
• Article open to correction and addition by community members
• All content and comments available to users
• Full article history present (As in a Wiki)

Drawbacks

• More work for original author
• Relies on the fair view of the original Author
• Article does not immediately reflect community changes
• Authors must think clearly which posting method to use (blog, bliki, wiki)

Working Method

A fully integrated Bliki system would allow account holders to post articles and at the time of posting choose which style of the three main styles to post them in. A Blog or Wiki article would function as they do at the moment. If the author opts to post a Bliki article they are assigned ownership of their article just like in a blog. Excluding the role of site moderators the interactions with this article can be broken down into two distinct groups, the author and the community. Both groups are able to view the article including any revisions and previous versions that may exist. Each group also has their own abilities related to the article which I describe below.

The community

As with most blogs the community is able to leave comments and feedback on the Bliki article. These appear at the foot of the article in a predetermined order (threaded or chronological for example). Bliki also gives the community the ability to suggest modifications to the article by editing the document to their wishes. These edits are not integrated directly into the article but instead are added to the document as footnotes. The edits can be minor revisions of facts or major rewrites for style or content.

Community users can opt to view the article in its original view without edits or view the article with the edits integrated into the main body.

The author

The author can edit the article as often as they like and each change is stored as they are in a Wiki. This means the article can easily be reverted to a previous state or can be viewed in a previous incarnation. When editing the article the author will be presented with the modifications suggested by the community and can accept all, part or none of the suggestions made.

To illustrate an example we can imagine an article about population statistics. A possible community contribution could be to update the statistics table with more recent figures which the author can then accept quickly and incorporate into the article.

A second user may expand part of the original article with some valid comments but stray too far from the original purpose of the article. The author in this case can elect to incorporate some of the changes into the article and move the rest of the changes into a sub-article linked to from the main article.

Finally a passionate community individual may completely disagree with the article and propose completely changing the views expressed in the article. A good author would reject the changes completely and move them into a separate sub article and put in a foreword about the different view in the new piece of work.

This system requires plenty of active involvement from article authors and site moderators but on the whole not more then the demands of a completely open Wiki system. The system I propose does rely heavily on the fair evaluation of feedback and comments from the community and the willingness of the original author to accept new information and points of view.

This Bliki system allows articles to maintain the original bias of the author while opening the article up to changes from the community which can be integrated or footnoted onto the article by the author. In addition the site users can opt to view all information supplied to the article by the community thus removing any bias the author may be imposing on the revisions to the article.

Conclusion

My new bliki system manages to marry the two opposing forces of Blogs and Wikis in a solution which I believe to be elegant and functional. The system allows users to express their personal views and content in a way which is open to constructive feedback from the wider community but without jeopardising the original aims of the article. By allowing authors and moderators to easily integrate community changes into the main article body they system makes relevant information more easily accessible in a structured and coherent manor.