Last night I installed a wiki on my local machine, to help me write and organize my thoughts for my book about story-systems. The software package I chose was MediaWiki, which is what runs the awesome Wikipedia. You can download a copy of MediaWiki off their sourceforge site. It runs in PHP and MySQL, so you’ll need to be running web server software on your machine. The one I’m running is just a bundle that includes Apache, PHP and MySQL. That kinda stuff’s easy enough to find online. MediaWiki pretty much sets itself up in under a couple minutes, and there’s no real confusing database configuration or any other kind of strange settings or other nonsense to fool around with. Which is great. It’s actually one of the best web applications I’ve ever seen. It’s so well thought out that I’m just continually astounded by it. The wiki syntax is really awesome and easy to understand too.
Oh, in case you don’t have any idea what the hell I’m talking about with wikis, or why I’d want one: a wiki is a really quick simple way of creating pages that link back and forth to one another. Everything is done on the fly and it’s super simple to use. It’s especially well suited to encyclopedia-style entries, which reference one another for additional information. The reason I’m using one on my computer is so that I can flesh out a fairly complex model of how religion, culture and stories work. It allows me to quickly and easily join and categorize things that are related, and also helps me think about my theory in terms of discrete blocks of information.
When I’m all done with it and with the book, there’s a good chance that I will roll out the wiki I create onto this website as well. However, it’s unlikely that I will allow other people to edit it, because I don’t want people to add in a bunch of lame shit that doesn’t make any damn sense. This is sort of contrary to the purpose of wikis, I realize, which are generally used as a collaborative knowledge-sharing tool, where anybody can edit and add to anybody else’s writing. I’m just not into that for the moment though. At least not for this story-systems stuff. Maybe I’ll put together a separate one where weirdos off the internet can go ahead and add information also. That might be fun in a whole other way.
- END -
ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
- Heraclitus and the common
- Anti-Statist Doctrine
- American Private Police Force: The Evolution of A Brand
- Google’s Call for Global Privacy Standards
- Basic Income Guarantee (BIG)
