維基是共同寫作的軟體

我在網路上做的

維基讓人能夠來到網站來創造些什麼

我認為這真正的結果是
人們發現

他們能創造些東西

其他人甚至不知道的東西
但他們回去相信

他們做出了使他們驚訝的東西

驚訝，所有人都很驚訝
就它的價值而言

HyperCard was a

kind of a drawing program where you could
draw a bunch of pages,

a bunch of screens, and then cause one
screen to link to another.

Well, nobody knew what hypertext was then
and so it was kind of hard to

figure out, well, what are you supposed 
to do with this?

And I liked that idea of having

something that kinda challenges you and

I like to figure out what to do with things so

so I thought, well, 
I'll make a bunch of cards

about how ideas move through my company.

An interesting thing about it was that it assumed that

if you wanted to make a link, if you wanted a button on one card to go to

another card

you would know what other card, and it would already exist.

And when I was asking people to tell me about

how ideas move through the company -
they were always talking about moving to a company

someplace that

there wasn't a card for - 
so I just made it so that

you could type the name of something and
when you press the button

to go to the link, and it wasn't there,
it made the card.

And making it on-demand, when you

move around a hypertext and when you got
to the edge of it

it would just push that edge out further, and so

I could tackle a subject that's

unimaginably large - every idea in my whole company -

but people who knew about ideas would

just follow it around, they would go from card to card until they went to some place they

got to the edge

but they went to the edge because they knew about that edge. They wanted to see what I

said about it. And my program said

"I don't know about this, tell me something about this."

And they just loved to write. 
In fact in HyperCard, people would come to sit at my desk

and they would want a demo of HyperCard

and I would show them this program and they wouldn't leave.

You know, I had a pet theory that

engineers wouldn't use an idea

unless they had seen it work before.
You know, that they were basically conservative.

And so

ideas were slow to be absorbed. And so, I was interested in how ideas moved around

in communities.

And that notion was more important than any particular hypertext.

But we had held some conferences

call it the pattern languages have
programming conference for Panerai which

is a programs

and had a hundred people come out to the
University of Illinois

this the summer of 1994

1994 yeah I'm

talked about how we needed to write
about computer programs in a different

way so that we can capture these ideas
and why people decided an idea was good

or bad

and then my friends said

"oh, let me show you this new thing called
the World Wide Web"

the University of Illinois right they
created the first graphical browser

an issue in this community said 
"Ward, we think you need to make

a hypertext

pattern repository."

Well of course I thought, you know, 
I've done this before with HyperCard

and I just needed to move it over to the Web

and then I wouldn't have people sit around
my desk because it was the web

it was international

so it solve that problem an could I
do

could I could I get forms and I had to
make up this idea

love mark-up
I had to account for the fact that I didn't have those buttons

that I had in HyperCard

you know it is different system but I
made markup in

and I tried it and i sat there and I
started typing stuff in

and it was as much fun as I remember I
knew it was fine

to do in hypercar new people with me my
desk but I could sit there

on the web and I said I've got this is
the feeling I

You know, I pay attention to what it
feels like to use computer programs and

it felt right. So I knew it was important, 
I knew it would serve the purpose

which I wanted to talk about ideas again
in computer programming

so the audience I was imagining was
people just like me

people were very surprised or in fact
sometimes people would

you know, send me e-mail saying 
"I don't want to mention it but

you've got terrible bug in your system - 
it lets people write anything!"

or they would say: "You've got a mistake on this page", 
and they

would send me

an email telling me what the mistake was 
and what I should have said instead.

And to encourage them I would just take
their email and and paste it into

the wiki and then send them a pointer
to the page.

I said "I took the liberty 
of taking your message and

putting in the wiki for you, 
but you could have done it yourself."

And I babysat the community that way

for a couple of years.
The other thing is, because I didn't have any notion...

You know, I encouraged people not to sign their words.

I thought, you know -
your words, your ideas are a gift to the community

and you shouldn't be claiming credit for it, 
because then nobody else is

going to improve it:
They are going to feel it's yours.

So I discouraged that. 
I used that a lot myself.

I did probably 80% of my editing anonymously

and that just let people feel that

"oh, there is a large community here, 
there is all this back and forth",

yet it has a consistency, because I wrote a lot of it.

But that's a bootstrapping problem: 
I had to make it feel like there is a community

to attract a community.

And people poured in.
The other thing is that I invited

the people with the most recognizable names.

When they showed up and wrote something,

they only had to write a page or two

because somebody else, who was less well known, 
would say:

"Oh, he's here - I should be here".

This kind of stroked vanity.

I might have been wrong on some of this stuff.

I mean, sometimes people feel that if they aren't 
gonna get credit for that they write,

they don't wanna write.

But I was encouraging people to recognize 
that they are gifting their words.

You know, it's just an idea, and ideas are cheap.

And when people would write something

and come back later and find that

their words had improved,

that's pretty exciting, you see.
"Boy, overnight this got better,

Who made this better?"
And it's almost a mystery, because

they didn't sign it either.

It's like "oh, the wiki made this better".

Well, you are not used to 
things getting better on their own.

A classic thing on

computer communication boards and that
at the time was

you would write something 
and somebody would spot a spelling error

so they would say:

"You spelled it this and it's spelled that"

Because the only place you could write 
is at the bottom.

You could add, but you couldn't change.

So you write something and you come back,

and all you find is 
tedious complaining about what you said.

Now on my system, you write a spelling error, 
somebody just fixes it.

and you come back and 
you don't even notice it was there.

But you find this one sentence that somebody added 
that really gets at something

you were trying to say.

So the positive stands out 
and the negative is just erased.

The nice thing there is if somebody comes along

in the meantime and is reading,
who knows less than you

they might find your partial answer valuable.

So this idea that

every thought is kind of a seed 
and it just grows and grows and grows,

It's been used very effectively on Wikipedia, but

it was very important on my wiki,
which was really about changing the way

people talked about computer programs

because there wasn't anything other 
than people's direct experience

to fall back on.
So as people would write about their experience programming

people would read it and it's 
the first time they had ever read

somebody talking about, say, being afraid 
that they wouldn't be able

to get the program done

done how their change the decisions they
made out of fear

or how they

found a way to work with somebody else

and find the thing that is acceptable
for everybothy

I had to the aspects we we were very
interested in how computer programs

could form a

in an emergent way where we didn't have
a master plan for the computer program

you say we have a general idea what we
want to do

and you know some of it and I know some of
it and joe knows some of it

and we're all gonna work together

and just let the program grow.
Well

you know to talk about something
like that which was unheard of at the

time

computer programming in an environment

yet tax system in a discussion board
that had the same property

well it was it was a demonstration at
the very concept we were trying to

explore for computer programming

and and it is true in computer program
we see it all the time in its accepted

now but it was

it was it was considered foolishness
when we started and now it's recognized

is really the only way

to make a really great program use my
first to a wine word

that I learned as they were trying to
direct me to the week we keep us between

terminals

hand wiki is a Hawaiian word that means
quickens Wiki Wiki means very quick

what's the very quick web it's always
been

technically called Wiki Wiki web but

when I wrote the script the CGI script
that made it

work it was time a unique system and a
curse on UNIX you our issues

abbreviations in lower case so I called
wiki

that CGI in

UNIX and so most people didn't wanna
bother to say where he with you it is

called wiki

and that's fine with me so it's like
saying I here's a system call

quick if you need more mines

you know it if you give 1 person knows
everything

and making gonna sit back and really
think deeply

they can see the whole program and just
write it down or or right upon

you know I A you know poetry is one of
those things as personal enough

you know did if you write a poem a day
after thirty years you're a great power

and you is probably a solo thing

but computer programs and encyclopedia
is

arm a scale that you have to make a
collaborative effort

and then to make good to make you read

like it was from a single mind is the
challenge and that's where people have

to

learn how to complement each other or I
like see

played each other strikes where you take

you know what you're good at night take
when I'm good and we find a way to fit

together

to make like we won Super Man and that

that happens it's it's not that hard
they resist I love working together

where

will agree ahead a time that

you'll do this part and I'll do this par
and if you don't hold up your end to the

deal

then you know I'm gonna you know take
you to court or something like that

that's this contracting

style stuff and I think that's thats
better than competition

but its it it is only works for things
where you know where you're going in the

act

know what the holes gonna be and can
thats

a useful way to work but that

because people who were finding

computer programs they thought well
that's how we wanted to work this way I

if I'm gonna pay you for six months to
run a computer program

I want to know what you're gonna do in
your gonna do when you're going to do

any you know

and it was the master plan and it turns
out that

that uses a small percentage is the
capability the computers computer is

much better if you

let it become what it really wants to be
your

the best that you can make it and that's
a

you know has a sort a sense of faith you
have to believe

that is gonna come out even though you
can't say what it is I mean if somebody

decided what the pages Wikipedia we're
gonna be

you know to be any other project they
would have made it worst I've importance

and pages and they would have been all
kinds of stuff that people

in here that they would have thought a
you know I got this

"grow from the center out" kind of dynamic right

for a hypertext document on the web

and that has been a model of sharing and involves

you can learn enough about each other to
develop this trust relationship

But there is a couple of things that Wikipedia did right

that didn't even occur to me.

For example, getting the licensing right.

I was careless about the licensing and I think that

saying "this has to be licensed this way, here is the ownership,

here is the guarantees going forward" - that's important.

And I just wasn't interested in that stuff,

so I didn't do that right.

Can you explain what that means, getting the licensing right?

The openness -

you know, I was open, but there was no guarantee

that is was open,

there was no agreement when somebody submitted.

There was an expectation,

but it wasn't written down. And in fact I think when I finally did write it down,

I said I own it -

you have the right to use it, but you can't keep it.

And that's not really open.

But I think Jimmy Wales' relationship

with Richard Stallman got that right.

The other thing that I just didn't think about,

or I thought would be too hard, was being international.

The fact that because it's licensed to be reused, of course that means

the content is free to go into other languages.

free to go into other languages

And the fact that people might want to read and write

in their own language - that international aspect is profound.

In terms of actually having an opportunity to,

in some sense, bring the world together.

Wikipedia is probably one of the strongest forces

in computers for, you know, creating peace in the world,  in essence.

That's fabulous, this understanding -

to just believe it could be done in every language.

When you find yourself reading

an encyclopedia that is about the things you care about, because

it was written by people just like you, talking about what they care about

and that caring

becomes so important to you, you trust this.

Well, the fact (is that) that same sort of

interaction is happening in a lot of different cultures.

Now, we can talk about edit wars and stuff like that.

But

what really is happening is that there are people who are moving back and forth

between different languages.

People who are fortunate enough to know and understand multiple cultures,

can, in this world, just carry little bits of culture back and forth.

And when I read something, even in the English Wikipedia,

and I see some mention of, you know, where the airplane was really invented

or something like that,

it's broad, in a sense,

because people who have a worldly view

- I'm unfortunately not very worldly -

have shared their worldly view.

And part of it is because they got involved with their language.

English is a big one,

but it is even more important if you have more obscure languages.

It makes you part of

one world of ideas.

And that idea that every language is important,

just as every person is important too.