Heather James called my attention to some conversations about gender and Wiki use. For example, there are issues of safety surrounding using one's real name or a pseudonym (of course that's an issue with anything one writes online, but in this case it's gender-centered). See also Girls Don't Wiki and Girls Do Wiki. My interest has been officially piqued.
Cross-posted at CultureCat.
Gender and Wikis
Submitted by Clancy on April 10, 2004 - 13:43.
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Document Mode and Thread Mode
Hmm...It seems like most of those wiki authors are stuck in "thread mode," a mode I strongly discourage in my own wiki. It seems to represent an effort to superficially impose a discussion-board or list-serv like structure to wikis.
A better model seems to be the "version comment" approach, in which authors make changes then describe their reasoning in a "comment field" that is only viewed by scanning a page's history.
Most of the best wiki sites I've seen these days utilize a discussion board alongside the wiki. This is certainly the case with my wiki--though I also have a "Comment" field that appears below each wiki page.
Anyway, if issues like this continue to crop up, it may convince me that the old total-anonymity model may be better. My feeling, though, is that we ought to discourage the formation of identity on wikis and instead focus on the identity of any individual wiki text; either this is a community project or not. ;-)