 Today we'll be talking about the wiki philosophy and why wikis are so useful. So a brief introduction about myself, I'm a doctor by training, and I'm involved in world-class medical research at my alma mater, which is the major University of Health and Allied Sciences based in Dar Salaam, Tanzania, which is in East Africa. And today I've chosen this topic about wiki philosophy because it's something that I personally find useful in my day-to-day dealings as a person who deals with a lot of knowledge and research in the medical field. I keep a personal wiki for myself, I've been doing it since 2016, and I use a small app called Idli wiki, more on that later. So I think the reason why I've chosen this topic today is that it's important for us to think about how to think basically, it's called metacognition, how to think, because it's what allows us to think better with time. For example, how might we achieve better creativity through simplicity by maximizing work not done, that's something for you to keep in your mind, brain teaser, while we go through this presentation. So what exactly is the wiki philosophy? The wiki way is best described as the ability to make bad edits easy to correct rather than hard to make, and that's the key thing about wiki, it's about editability. The easier you make it for users, strangers around the internet to correct bad edits, you have yourself a wiki. And it's a pretty simple concept on its own, but there is more to it than that. And that is the good expression of wiki philosophy in practice is that it should support the ability to quickly create, to support the creation of ideas quickly, and to support generativity in furthering creativity. Now, this term might not make sense to you as of now, but we'll explore it better by looking at the history of wikis in general. So most of you know who created the first wiki, it's a wonderful man called Ward Cunningham, and here he is giving wiki mania talk back in 2005. And the original purpose of wikis was to help document something called pattern languages, or sometimes it's called referred to as design patterns. And what design patterns are is that they are reusable forms of a solution to a common design problems. So you could refer to wikis as a problem solution playbook. And that was the original purpose of wiki as explained by Ward Cunningham in a paper published with Michael Mefahe back in 2014. And his original wiki, which was the wiki wiki web screenshot over here for you to see, this was actually the first wiki and the first thing it was used for was to document different approaches to solving different problems in software engineering and software development. And this was its original purpose back in 1995. And this website is still there for your information. It's still a pretty interesting place to go through for interesting reads about a lot of the ideas that are being used today to build software. So there are a couple of concepts that the wiki philosophy encourages, which includes embracing rapid changes, generativity. Now generativity is about creating new complex patterns from simple deterministic rule sets. The simplest example I could give you is DNA. It's just a couple of bases, AGTP, that gives rise to all the complexity in biology that we know of and that support us. And another example is the alphabet. The simple rule set of alphabets allows us to create complicated and fascinating languages that we see today, like the different language wiki language wikis that we have today. And it also allows for falsification and refinement so that things do not lead to obsolescence, things do not freeze to death and become obsolete. And good design emerging from bottom up teams and exploration from the bottom up and learning and adapting accordingly because you are able to rapidly iterate on whatever you're creating. So this actually, if some of you are into software development, this might actually sound familiar because these are the same principles that led to the creation of the agile manifesto in software development and subsequently the rise of agile development in software engineering. So all this came from the first wikis in general. And this leads us to an interesting question, is Wikipedia the biggest agile project ever? Or the worldwide web for that matter because it does use the same similar principles, building complexity from simple rule sets. And in a way, in fact, they are all works of generativity, they encourage bottom up rapid creativity, no committee could build Wikipedia or the web on its own. If a committee must exist, it's only to create these absolutely simple rule sets to support the creation of more complicated systems by end users. And this is what we mean by the question we posed at the beginning of this presentation, creativity through simplicity, i.e. maximizing work not done. You don't need to do all the work, you just need to create a simplified rule set model that can support the creation of bigger stuff. So what's next for the, this is the wiki philosophy in the past and present, but what about the future, what's coming next? Currently, we're seeing a new wave of wiki-like personal knowledge management software that's becoming more and more popular online and offline. And these are some of the examples that exist today, you may have heard of Notion.so, it's a popular personal knowledge management app. And there's also Rome Research, which has lead to the rediscovery of bi-directional links and knowledge graphs, also very popular, and also have many open source alternatives, one of which being something called Tiddly wiki. It's a very popular tool which I use, and in fact, this entire presentation is being hosted inside of a Tiddly wiki, and I'll show you how it works in a moment. But these last innovations over here are helping fuel the emergence of something more distributed and generated versus centralized and prescriptive workspaces, meaning that currently the state of most wikis is that they're centralized. But now we're seeing an emergence of distributed or decentralized applications. And Tiddly wiki is the simplest example I can offer to you as a case study, as we shall see later. And why are we exploring distributed wikis? It's because Wikipedia is a centralized repository, for example, it is vulnerable to certain problems inherent to its design, which includes not least censorship. It is actually being censored or currently being blocked in 15 different countries. Not all of them are the stereotypical authoritarian countries. Some of them are even Western democratic countries. So it doesn't really matter. You can be blocked by anyone if you become inconvenient for whatever reason, legally or illegally or whatever. You're still vulnerable to censorship when you're centralized. Distributed wikis can help host content in a more distributed fashion and help create robust or even antifragile. Antifragile is a term that's used to describe systems that gain from disorder or from stress rather than lose to disorder. If I could give an example, a quick example, your muscle benefits from stress as a good amount of stress to keep itself in tone and in shape rather than complete relaxation or complete lack of stress, which would actually lead to muscle atrophy. So consider organizations using Wikipedia articles as seeds for more specialized content. You see the kind of a federal redistribution of content from Wikipedia in order to create decentralized or distributed wikis that are more specialized to a certain discipline and you consequently can have an organic ecosystem of wikis as a result. So Tiddler wiki is a case study. Tiddler wiki is a very unique wiki tool, not because it supports nonlinear thought. That is, your information isn't organized in a hierarchical fashion, but more nonlinear, kind of like how our brain works. It's also decentralized. It's not hosted in one domain. You can download it and store it and move it around like a simple document. The only difference is that it's an HTML document. It's self-contained. It's truly serverless. When I say serverless in the context of Tiddler wiki, it truly is serverless. There is no backend to speak of, which makes it extremely private and extremely robust compared to most tools out there. And there's a limited rule set inside, which includes wiki text, similar to what's supported on Wikipedia, macros, widgets, and you can host it on the web and you can host it on something called the Node.js platform, which allows for infinite possibilities in terms of what you can create from it. It's very accessible. There is little to no programming skills required. Anyone can edit it into something of their own. So here's a short little demo here. Let's say I've created this simple macro here, and from this tiny macro, you can generate an entire miniature app for supporting Tiddles. So for example, I can show it to you right here. This little macro can give you this to-do app. And it's a pretty complete miniature application running inside this wiki. This is a to-do list, outstanding tasks. I can dismiss it. I can check it off. I can remove it. And if you look at it inside, it's built up of a simple markup that can support the creation of interesting creative ideas using the wiki text markup. And it's not very complicated. Anyone can use it. Some creatives in the community managed to create an entire trail of clone using this simple rule set. And here's a screenshot of the whole thing. It's really awesome. And it's just amazing what you can do, how much you can express if you have such malleable software. So as I said, centralized wikis, as they are today in mainstream wikis, for that matter, they pose certain challenges. And there's also another challenge of quality. I chose this quartier. I don't know if any of you know this show Rick and Morty, but there's a part where this is the main character Rick Sanchez says tells another character, don't believe everything you see on Wikipedia. So the current challenge faced by Wikipedia is that there's still this for sometimes for the right reasons, sometimes for the wrong reasons. There's still this atmosphere of mistrust, because of how the content is generated. There is no, there is a perceived lack of accuracy. There's a perceived lack of authenticity. And these challenges are real, and they have to be dealt with by the committee, and they're being dealt with in many ways, but these are challenges that are continuously being addressed. The question of trust centralization can sometimes breed mistrust for the wrong reasons. There's always going to be someone who's mistrustful of something that is kind of beyond control, which is kind of weird because wikis in general are you can influence them and that's precisely why many people sometimes might not trust them because anyone can influence them. Though Wikipedia is very robust in its ability to root out malicious edits. There's also the concept of federal wikis that is trying to solve this problem of trust. Federal wikis are being developed by the original creator of Ward Cunningham. You may have heard of the federated wiki is into that and it's something that people should keep a close eye on. And also specialization wikis, you could have, you do have the spawning of different wikis that are able to become more robust because they're specialized. There's maybe a class of experts who review them and that makes them more robust in the eyes of people in those domains. And also the question of quality quality, the beauty of wikis is that they can always support continuous improvement in quality, unlike other platforms and that's a strength and a weakness at the same time. And establishing what could help meet these challenges is establishing best practices on how to use wiki produce. There are 748 opinions on research gate on how to cite Wikipedia, for example. So this is something that's still being debated a lot of academic circles on how to meet because Wikipedia is pretty useful. But how to appropriately use it is a place of active discussion. And we as the wikipedians, we as Wikimedians, we can all play our role in contributing to the discussion and improving the ability to cite Wikipedia in whatever manner or use it in an academic environment. So Aluta continue these are challenges that are always being addressed as of now. And this is the end of this presentation. I hope you enjoyed it. There are a couple of links here that I think you might find useful. You can support Wiki monetarily or through volunteering. You can join the community if you love the platform. Special acknowledgement to these individuals for making these plugins that supported this presentation possible. Thank you and that's it for the presentation.