Alum Stuart Geiger at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers
Stuart Geiger, BCNM alum and postdoc at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, will be making his way to Tartu, Estonia from October 18 to 21. The 18th annual meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers will have Stuart speak on the second day of the event, where he intends to talk about the changing software of wikis from 1995 to 2002.
Stuart plans to discuss the change and modifications in the platforms, incorporations of new features, and more.
From Stuart's website:
This paper examines the early history of “anyone can edit” wiki software – originally developed in 1995, six years before Wikipedia’s origin. While today, the idea of a wiki is associated with large-scale, massively-distributed encyclopedic knowledge production, this was not always the case. Articles on pre-Wikipedia wikis were often closer to a Joycean stream of consciousness than Wikipedia’s Britannica-inspired texts that speak in single voice, and the underlying wiki platform lacked many of the affordances that are now taken for granted in wiki platforms. In fact, the creator of the first wiki advised Wikipedia’s co-founders that the goals of creating a general-purpose encyclopedia and a wiki were inherently contradictory.
For more detail, see a brief summary of Geiger's paper here.