Tracking Wiki contributions to a blog
Since 1991 I’ve been contributing to websites of one sort or another: Online forums, bulletin board and especially since 1999, wikis. What do I have to show for it? Very little.
While I like to think I am not ego-centric, personal reputations are increasingly important in a world of high mobility in the workforce. I need to be responsible for all that I say, and I’d like a record, thanks very much.
Wikis are ego-less. This is a feature: its about the idea, not about the person who said it. That’s great until a newcomer walks into a community: without a record of individual’s contributions there is no quick, anonymous and direct way for that newcomer to gain a perspective on who the experts are. If you are the expert you might have a problem with that.
Going forward, I’d like an easy way to track my contributions. And for the record, it’d be neat to pull out my past contributions too.
For retrospective entries it would not be too hard to crawl the page histories on wikis such as TWiki.org that I’ve contributed to most. For future ones a simple firefox extension that could be told to track and log form submissions (technically via HTTP POST).
Unless its easy I’m not likely to implement this, but I think someone should. Wikis help communities work towards finished summaries, blogs help individuals get their individual thoughts and reputations “out there”. These goals need not be at odds to one another.
As I said in my blogs are like plastics, wikis are like leaves posting, I think more people should use a wiki. But to be really compelling the individual should not need to lose the reputation and personal record benefits of using a blog.
No wiki-blogs / bliki addresses this need, as far as I’ve seen. I welcome solutions.
