Thursday, September 28, 2006

About the wiki

Well, it seems like there's interest in a litwiki or footnote wiki, or whatever we like to call it. Thanks to all of you who commented with encouragement and suggestions!

Here's where we are: Kate, the facilitator of A Curious Singularity, a short story group blog, thought that one of their short stories would make a good pilot for the litwiki, and a lot of people agreed, so let's try that. They are reading Virginia Woolf's story "Kew Gardens" beginning October 10th, so I can post the story on our wiki, and we can have at it. It'll be an experiment; maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but it will be fun to try. Kate's thought was this (from comments to an earlier post): "The discussion could occur first via a group blog like "A Curious Singularity" or the "Slaves of Golconda" then the insights that emerge from the discussion could be transformed into annotations, and the questions that emerge could send people off on a bit of research and the answers could then be transformed into annotations, and so on." Cool, yes?

Here's where I need your help. We have two possible sites that can host our wiki (there are many, many possibilities, but these two seemed particularly good -- although I haven't done very thorough research): wikispaces or tiddlywiki. Many thanks to Mandarine for setting up the tiddlywiki! Which do you like better?

Tiddlywiki looks cooler and seems to do more, including using tags, which I think would mean a person could sort footnotes by author and by topic, or whatever sorts of tags we assign. It might also be harder to learn, and I think you need a password to save your edits. This would mean it wouldn't be quite as open and public -- maybe good, maybe not. Wikispaces is simpler but maybe not quite as versatile. That one is now public, so anyone can edit.

Thoughts?

Here are two sites that do similar things: an annotated version of James Joyce's story "The Dead," which wasn't done on a wiki, and the Queen Loana wiki, done on wikispaces.

Update: if you want to edit and save your edits on the tiddlywiki site (which you are welcome to do, of course), you'll need a password: "muttboy." And check out this link on the tiddlywiki as a hyperlinked blog. Cool.