Wikipatterns

Foreword

I launched the first wiki in March of 1995. I was an activist in a community of activists. We were all for change. We were for changing the way programmers thought about programming, a narrow topic I must admit, but one with far reaching consequence.

In a decade my wiki site grew to 30,000 pages exploring all aspects of our agenda, thinking people could engage with this material at whatever pace they could muster. Over periods of months, or sometimes years, our critics would evolve. They would say: (1) you're crazy, (2) maybe you're not so crazy, (3) I'm going to try some of these ideas, and then they would say, (4) wow, I've just had some amazing experiences that I have to tell you about.

This is the awesome power of community.

About a year into this journey I called a meeting for wiki authors at OOPSLA, our big programming conference. Attendees could have talked about any of a hundred aspects of my grand experiment. But one thing was on their mind. The question each one asked was, how can they get their peers to collaborate with the agility that they saw on my wiki? How could they make their own wiki work?

Not only had my activist agenda been served by wiki, but wiki itself had surfaced as a worthy agenda in its own right.

There is a special magic that happens when people collaborate. Collaboration touches on our human nature in a way that is easily felt but not so easily explained.

There is also a lot of un-magic going around that prevents us from collaborating. We've made ...