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wiKiPedia: a GeNuiNe
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— miNus the editors
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choices about linking and page-structure. One popular sport is
“googlebombing,” in which web-writers collude to link to a given
page using a humorous keyword so that the page becomes the
top result for that word — which is why, for a time, the top result
for “more evil than Satan” was Microsoft.com. Likewise, the prac-
tice of “blogspamming,” in which unscrupulous spammers post
links to their webpages in the message-boards on various blogs,
so that Google will be tricked into thinking that a wide variety
of sites have conferred some authority onto their penis-enlarge-
ment page.]
But even Google is conservative in assuming that there is a
need for editorship as distinct from composition. Is there a way
we can dispense with editorship altogether and just use composi-
tion to refine our ideas? Can we merge composition and editor-
ship into a single role, fusing our creative and critical selves?
You betcha.
“Wikis” [fn: Hawai’ian for “fast”] are websites that can be
edited by anyone. They were invented by Ward Cunningham in
1995, and they have become one of the dominant tools for In-
ternet collaboration in the present day. Indeed, there is a sort of
Internet geek who throws up a Wiki in the same way that ants
make anthills: reflexively, unconsciously.
Here’s how a Wiki works. You put up a page:
Welcome to my Wiki. It is rad.
There are OtherWikis that inspired me.
Click “publish” and bam, the page is live. The word “OtherWi-
kis” will be underlined, having automatically been turned into a
link to a blank page titled “OtherWikis.” (Wiki software recog-
nizes words with capital letters in the middle of them as links to
other pages. Wiki people call this “camel-case,” because the capi-
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