A blog looking at business communication, knowledge management, scripting tools, OS technology news and other things of interest to mobile tech workers. As I find interesting news this will also contain pointers to thoughts related to configuration managment, change management and general software development.
The css-discuss wiki has pretty much looked after itself since its inception a year and a half ago, thanks to a small but active community of `wiki gardeners`.
I hadn't heard the term wiki gardener before and ran across this reference to it over at Simon Willison's weblog. So I did a little poking around which lead to the Theory of WikiJungles:
There is a theory that any Wiki which has more than 10 contributors, but less than 100 will eventually become a jungle of pages that nobody can make heads and tails of. With less, the people usually know it well enough to understand the structure, but with more than 100 active users WikiGardeners will appear.
A Wiki Gardener according to the same source is:
a person who goes around the wiki, correcting typos here, rearranging things to be more readable there.
In general, good WikiGardeners are liked and respected, since they have the magical ability to take a jumble of pages and create good, readable text out of them.
Anyone can be a WikiGardener: If you see a typo or a spelling mistake, feel free to correct it! If you feel up to it, rearrange a page, or split a long page to smaller pages, or if you think some page belongs to some WikiCategory, add a link to it. If you make a mistake, don't worry about it, since everything you do can be restored.
Neat idea. I'd much rather be a gardener than an editor.
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