The Wiki Way

出版者:Addison-Wesley Professional

作者:Bo Leuf

页数:464

出版时间:2001-4-13

价格:USD 69.99

装帧:Paperback

isbn号码:9780201714999

具体描述

Why This Book? The idea for this book came from a couple of different directions. One was that I (Bo) had been getting more and more involved in collaborative efforts over the Internet. Another was that running and customizing a cluster of wiki servers for some time had given considerable material to use in a book. I closely followed developments in a number of areas concerning discussion and collaboration tools and saw that once wiki servers were adopted, enthusiasm for using them was invariably great. A wiki server is in many ways an ideal tool for collaborative idea exchange and writing--informal, quick, and accessible. It even turns out to be a very useful Internet-aware personal notebook. Best of all, with a suitable source, setting up your own wiki server is remarkably easy, whether for personal use or wider network collaboration. What seemed to be lacking for a broader acceptance was simply a more collected introduction to and analysis of both the tool and the culture that has grown up around it. The best thing to do, so it seemed, was to provide such a reference based on the material I had. The thought was to include a serving of sources and tools to get interested readers up and running with their own wiki servers. Therefore, I thought the matter over, put together a book proposal, and approached Ward Cunningham about licensing issues for his sources. Best to go to the source for the sources, I reasoned. I then learned that both he and publisher Addison-Wesley were keen to see a good book on the subject. Editor Mike Hendrickson at Addison-Wesley proved very supportive and approved the idea of a combined analysis and do-it-yourself tutorial. And given the nature of the subject, a deeper collaboration between Ward and me was the natural way to go about it. The result is here, and we hope that you find this volume a worthy and valuable reference as you explore the wiki way. Why You Want to Read This We hope you will read The Wiki Way with a mind open to exploring simple yet powerful tools that you can have complete control over. We would like you to think of wiki as "leverage-ware": a tool to amplify your associativity, connectivity, and community--not to forget creativity. Play with the concept and the bundled sources, and see where it takes you. This book targets primarily three distinct groups of readers, reflecting the predominant and potential uses of discussion and collaboration tools. Readers who can discover here a quick way to implement a hyperlinked style of personal notebook or information manager on their own system--one that can link both their own pages and external Internet or intranet resources at will. Call it a free-form personal information manager (PIM), which is "open source" and uses a nonproprietary file format. Industry professionals who need a collaborative tool or knowledge base server of this nature but lack both an overview and a how-to-implement guide in order to make informed decisions about what to deploy on the corporate intranet or public Web site. Researchers and students in academic settings who both study the design and implementation of collaborative tools and use them in their day-to-day submission and collaboration work. Wiki servers are already widely used to fill many roles, from simple discussion forums rather similar to the old BBS hubs, to collaborative tools and searchable information archives. A number are thinly disguised as a new breed of Internet presence providers, offering "instant" edit-and-serve Web hosting solutions. Hundreds of versions exist hidden from public view on corporate or academic intranets. They have been set up for such demanding tasks as tracking product development, customer or developer support, and paper submissions. As noted on at least one major site, the quantity of e-mail typical for a project can otherwise be overwhelming. The wiki concept combines the immediacy of direct editing and "most recent postings" with adaptable structure and timeless persistency, where even old entries can be commented, amended, and brought up to date. Typically, existing implementations were cobbled together by whoever found enough resources and hints on the Internet to set one up. The choice of wiki type has until now usually been determined by what is found first and happens to work. Tweaking tends to be haphazard. What is lacking in the field is a more formal resource that can give the presumptive administrator a collected and clearer idea of the options and theory, along with examples of how to adapt the wiki to the particular demands of the situation at hand. Well, we've tried to make this book that resource. Book Structure The Wiki Way is a combined exposition, tutorial, and manifesto. This single reference volume aims to provide you with historical background, the state of the art, and some of the vision. We seek to meld practical how-to tips with in-depth analysis, all in an easy-to-read informal and personal style--even entertaining, as our technical reviewers assured us. We bring you conceptual overviews, philosophical reflection, and contextual essays from professionals in the field. A tall order for a single book? Assuredly, but it was fun trying. We have chosen to organize the book into three parts, each catering to different needs and interests. There is some overlap, but we think you'll find that each part approaches the wiki concept from complementary directions, with a tone and depth appropriate to each. No matter what level of detail and involvement is desired, we wanted you the reader to always find something worthwhile to focus on. First comes Part I, From Concepts to Using Wiki , which guides you through the basic concepts concerning Web collaboration in general and wiki collaborative culture in particular, and then we show you how to quickly get your own wiki up and running. Later, practical chapters focus on the mechanics of using a wiki server and an overview of content structuring. Part II, Understanding the Hacks , gets to the technological core with extensive examinations into how a wiki server works. After a discussion about the structural aspects of a wiki database, we provide a systematic analysis of basic wiki functionality and show simple ways to customize your wiki. Although it may seem unusual to give the tweaks before the full code analysis, we find that this is a workable approach. Then follows a complete program analysis of the components in the base example script. This sets the scene for the following chapter, where we suggest a number of cool hacks, easily inserted in the example Perl script, to modify and extend wiki behavior beyond the basics for specified contexts. We end part 2 with a technical overview chapter aimed at the wiki administrator, which takes up issues and tools that deal with usage, security, server loads, backup, and revision control. Part III, Imagine the Possibilities , takes us into broader realms of usage, utility, pitfalls, and vision. We present anecdotal accounts and personal views from many sources to make this book much more than Yet Another Programming Book or Yet Another Application Manual . Material here comes both directly and indirectly from a host of professionals who develop or use wiki or wiki-like systems in their work. First, a chapter summarizes a chorus of views from wiki communities. Next, we share in some of the experiences gained from using wiki widely in academic settings. Finally, we provide some interesting case studies culled from the corporate world. A collection of appendixes supplements the main body of the book by providing extra levels of detail, along with collected references and resources that would otherwise have cluttered up the main text. To help you navigate what is undeniably a book filled with many facts and to complement the detailed table of contents, chapter summaries provide a quick overview of the main topics covered, and we trust that the publisher has crafted a decent index. Scattered throughout the text you will find the occasional highlighted and numbered "tip", a special insight or recommendation that might otherwise pass unremarked on casual reading. Errata and Omissions There are assuredly mistakes and errors of omission in this book; it's unavoidable, despite (or sometimes because of) the many edit passes, proofing, and the excellent efforts of editors and technical reviewers. Let this not cast any shadow on any of the many people who worked with and contributed to this book. Getting a book out is a complex process with numerous deadlines, and a finished book (any book) is neither "finished" nor perfect, just (hopefully) the best that could be done within the constraints at hand. We have, however, taken great care to get things right. For example, all code examples are taken from functional wikis. Functional for us, that is. We could not test every conceivable version and configuration a reader might run into, but we are confident that the sources will work on most, and we believe we have included enough information to allow the reader to work out any problems. Any code changes made along the way, no matter how "trivial", were verified on a working script. There are many ways to code solutions; ours are not the only or necessarily the "best" ones, and we willingly concede that these are "hacks". But on the other hand, we wanted the code to be understandable and easily modified by the reader, so the "best" or most "optimized" variant would probably have been wrong for that purpose in any case. In some cases we may have simplified things or made statements that someone, somewhere, will be able to point to and say, "Not so!" That may be; we could not verify everything, and sometimes the simple answer, correct in its place, was good enough for the focus at hand. The hardest mistakes to catch in this context are the things we "know", because some of these unquestioned truths can in fact be wrong, have changed since we learned them, or have more complex answers than the one we learned. Omissions are generally due to the fact that we had to draw the line somewhere in t...

用户评价

这是一本可以放在案头，随时翻阅的工具书，但它的哲学深度又远超一般工具书的范畴。如果你期待的是那种快速能让你上手搭建一个网站的傻瓜教程，那么你可能会失望，因为它更关注的是“为什么”而不是“如何操作”的每一步点击。然而，如果你想理解如何让一个群体自发地、有质量地维护一个庞大且不断更新的知识库，那么这本书就是你的圣经。它的语言风格非常沉稳、客观，几乎没有使用任何夸张或煽动性的词汇，所有的论点都建立在坚实的逻辑推理和大量的实践观察之上。我注意到书中对“激励机制”的探讨非常细腻，它区分了内在动机（如掌握知识的乐趣）和外在动机（如社区声望），并提出了如何巧妙地平衡二者的策略。这套策略在实际应用中，比如在开源社区或专业论坛的管理中，具有极高的借鉴价值。它迫使你跳出“内容填充”的思维定式，转而关注“信息流动的健康度”。

我原本以为这会是一本偏向IT技术指南的书籍，但事实证明我的预判完全错了。它的核心关乎“人与信息的关系”，探讨的是如何建立一个能够自我修正、自我净化的信息生态系统。这本书最让我感到震撼的是它对“权威性构建”的论述。在充斥着碎片化信息和虚假新闻的今天，如何让一个开放平台上的信息获得公信力，是摆在所有内容运营者面前的难题。作者通过剖析多个真实世界的案例，展示了如何通过透明的编辑流程、明确的贡献者层级和基于事实的辩论机制，来逐步积累用户的信任。这不光是对技术实现的探讨，更是对社会心理学和群体智慧的深刻挖掘。我尤其喜欢其中关于“冲突解决机制”的描述，它提供了一套近乎于辩论赛规则的结构化方法，避免了开放协作中常见的“口水战”和无休止的争吵，将焦点重新拉回到内容本身。读完这一部分，我感觉像是上了一堂关于高级谈判和治理艺术的课程。

对于长期从事内容策划和信息架构工作的人来说，这本书的价值无可估量，它提供了一套近乎普适性的框架，用于评估和改进任何形式的集体创作项目。我花了整整一个周末的时间来仔细研读，尤其被其中关于“内容生命周期管理”的章节深深吸引。作者提出的“动态修订与归档分离”的策略，巧妙地解决了版本控制中最头疼的问题——如何在保持历史可追溯性的同时，确保用户看到的是最新、最准确的信息。这套方法论的严谨性，体现在它对元数据规范的极高要求上，但作者并没有让这些技术细节淹没读者，而是通过清晰的流程图和实际操作的“陷阱”提示，将复杂的流程变得条理分明。读到后期，我发现自己不自觉地开始用书中的术语来审视手头上的文档结构，它像一把手术刀，能精准地切入现有体系的痛点。这本书的叙事节奏非常快，信息密度极高，需要反复阅读才能完全消化其中蕴含的深层逻辑，但这种“需要咀嚼”的特质，恰恰说明了它的深度所在。

这本书简直是知识管理领域的一股清流，读完之后我感觉自己对如何构建一个有效、可持续的知识库有了全新的认识。作者在书中深入浅出地剖析了“维基”模式的精髓，它不仅仅是一种技术工具，更是一种协作和治理的哲学。我特别欣赏它在阐述复杂概念时所采用的类比和案例，那些来源于实际操作中的成功与失败的经验，让理论变得无比的鲜活和可操作。比如，书中关于“社区共识的形成机制”那一部分，详尽地描述了从初步提案到最终定稿的每一步骤，中间穿插的对于不同权力结构下决策效率的讨论，发人深省。它并没有鼓吹某一种单一的理想模型，而是引导读者去思考，在自己的具体情境下，什么样的结构才是最能激发贡献者热情的。那种对细节的把握，对人性在群体协作中作用的深刻洞察，是很多同类书籍所欠缺的，读起来完全没有枯燥的理论说教感，更像是经验丰富的前辈在手把手地传授秘籍。我甚至开始反思我们团队现有的文档系统，发现其中很多低效的瓶颈正是由于忽略了这种人文层面的考量。

这本书的结构设计本身就是对“维基”精神的一种完美诠释——模块化、相互关联且易于导航。每一章都能独立地提供深刻的见解，但将它们串联起来，就能看到一个完整的、有机的知识系统如何运转。我尤其欣赏它对“技术局限性”的诚实讨论。作者毫不避讳地指出，任何系统都有其脆弱之处，例如信息过载导致的“疲劳筛选”问题，或是少数核心贡献者垄断话语权的风险。这种坦诚的态度，反而增强了整本书的可信度。它教会我的最重要一课是：一个优秀的知识系统不是“建好”就一劳永逸的，它是一个持续的“培育”过程。书中对“知识的民主化”这一宏大主题的探讨，也让人深思，如何在开放性的同时，保证信息的准确性和深度不被稀释。读完后，我最大的感受是，我们对待知识的方式需要一次结构性的升级，而这本书提供了一个清晰的升级蓝图。

介紹wiki來由的古典教科書。

介紹wiki來由的古典教科書。

介紹wiki來由的古典教科書。

介紹wiki來由的古典教科書。

介紹wiki來由的古典教科書。