WikiIsPayingOff

ThoughtStorms Wiki

I think Mae West is credited with "always keep a diary and one day it will keep you".

I've been keeping this wiki for about 8-9 months now. On the whole I've been the main contributor. The few discussions I've had with other people have been extremely valuable and welcome (I've learned a lot, thanks everyone) but fairly infrequent.

Nevertheless, I've now started feeling that keeping a wiki is paying off. I've noticed it's starting to act as an associative memory. For a long while it's been useful to catalogue my ideas and the connections between them, but mostly when I go to write a page I already have, in my mind, the connections it will make with others.

But over the last month there's been a change. Maybe this wiki has hit a critical mass. (CommaCount 462 pages, SpaceCount 686 pages) Now I'm finding that I enter a page and have in mind a number of links to make to other pages, but when I follow those links, I discover the second (and higher) order connections genuinely surprising and flooding my mind with ideas.

For example, yesterday I realized I should put a link between ClassWarBetweenProductsAndServices (which was already connected to ProductivityOfKnowledgeWork and AutomatingMechanicalJobs) and CreativeClass (which was connected with ideas about city planning, InformationCity, LowRoad and OrganicArchitecture) I hadn't previously connected the two clusters of pages and ideas together in my mind. But the resonance as I made the link and started thinking about the ideas was shocking. Within a couple of minutes I realized that CreativeClass obviously connected with NetoCracy. And saw the connections between the product / service conflict and the Imploitation / Exploitation distinction. Now my mind is reeling as I try to grasp the big picture that this adds up to. Trying to combine these ideas is something new.

And it's something I discovered only through using wiki to document them. (Hmmm. ... Maybe I should hook this last thought to NetworkEpistemology for BonusFreakyConnectionPoints.)

Really this is delivering on the promise of WikiIsaCauldron .

Working with TouchGraph as an interface can push this association even further. –BillSeitz

: Good point, I haven't been playing with that for a while, but now ThoughtStorms has hit a critical mass, it might be a lot more interesting. – PhilJones