11 ms·

Blogs rot. Wikis wait

196 points by j3s 2y ago

internetter 2y ago
I quite like the "Wiki" on my site. It's half blog, half wiki. The entries can be dated. They are presented chronologically. Navigation metadata is assigned to each entry. But not every entry appears on the blog feed. I can link between entries like [[link]]. Each entry tracks the links to and from it. The best of both worlds I think ^^
- simonw 2y ago
  I'm contemplating adding something like that to my https://simonwillison.net https://simonwillison.net site at the moment: most of my content works great as a blog but I like the idea of having some content that's more "page like" which I can continually update - things like a list of currently active projects.
  - smnrg 2y ago
    Julian.com (Julian Shapiro) is a great, hyper-focused example of regularly refined pages.
  - internetter 2y ago
    If you'd like a reference implementation, it's all under AGPL here: https://github.com/boehs/site https://github.com/boehs/site :)
  - PhilippGille 2y ago
    Martin Fowler calls it Bliki: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/ https://martinfowler.com/bliki/
    - rcarmo 2y ago
      Yeah, although the form predates the term.
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  Dates are very helpful, especially for information about software.
rpcope1 2y ago
Wikis are great, but it feels like outside of Wikipedia they've been dying. I wish bashhackers was still with us, and regret even more that there's not other large old school wikis for things like systems software development or other programming languages (or even a newer take on the original WikiWikiWeb). I guess maybe some of it is GitHub pages or that weird GitHub wiki thing now, but they don't really feel the same.
- rcarmo 2y ago
  My blog is actually a wiki, and has been going for 23 years. There are quite a few other old farts^W^Wvintage bloggers out there with similar setups.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  I feel like that's been helped along culturally by fandom.com buying out various independent wikis and then shittifying them to the point of unusability.
  - TkTech 2y ago
    There's an ongoing mini-revolution against Fandom, with the wikis that have the manpower moving away to other platforms like wiki.gg, WeirdGloop, or just self-hosted. Minecraft, WoW, Runescape, LoL, etc.
    - j3s 2y ago
      yep! i recommend indie wiki buddy for discovering these sorts of community-led wikis. the extension recognizes when you’re on fandom and recommends equivalent community wikis instead fandom will not take down old wikis (that’d be bad for SEO), so the fandom content persists even after a full community migration. just one of the many shitty things that company does.
      - shnock 2y ago
        This? https://getindie.wiki/ https://getindie.wiki/ Thank you from a long-time hater of Fandom and PE-driven enshittification and lover of community-driven knowledge work
altairprime 2y ago
Note that the usage of “blog” in this poem has nothing to do with livejournals and pre-spam personal journal blogs in general; it’s referring to the post-indexing apocalypse brought on by SEO and Google reacting to ‘freshness’.
aaron695 2y ago
Great poetry. It's timely that Oxford 'academics' have no idea what 'brain rot' means but Urban Dictionary (A wiki) gets it right. https://corp.oup.com/word-of-the-year/ https://corp.oup.com/word-of-the-year/ https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Brainrot https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Brainrot Most Wikis don't work, it'd be interesting to work out what it takes. Starting list - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis Encyclopedia Dramatica (NSFW) is better than Conservapedia for instance.
- scubbo 2y ago
  > It's timely that Oxford 'academics' have no idea what 'brain rot' means but Urban Dictionary (A wiki) gets it right. I have never seen Brain Rot used consistently with any of the UD definitions, and always consistently with the OUP's definition.
  - emodendroket 2y ago
    I agree with you. Also, Wiktionary is much more Wiki-like and a much better resource than Urban Dictionary.
  - Macha 2y ago
    The front page of urban dictionary's definitions are all added post 2020, which fits since the urban dictionary usage is the way far more online members of gen z use it.
j3s 2y ago
ironically i posted this on my blog 3:
xenodium 2y ago
Doing my bit to bring pre-seo-driven, or just genuine blogging to the foreground. Just launched https://lmno.lol https://lmno.lol blogging platform (no tracking or ads here). Read blogs from anywhere. No JS required.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
shortrounddev2 2y ago
Any time I discover some new piece of coding information, or solve an obscure bug for which there is not a lot of common documentation, I write about it in my personal mediawiki server. Maybe some day when it has more content I'll host it publicly, but for now I find it more useful than a blog or a personal journal
topato 2y ago
Oh GOD! PLEASE don't kill vore.website!!! I very much appreciate that service! <3
- j3s 2y ago
  vore isn’t going anywhere <3 any features you’ve been itching for btw? thinking about spending a weekend on it soon.
  - j3s 2y ago
    besides, wikis have RSS feeds too. gotta follow em from somewhere :)
emodendroket 2y ago
I don't know what the heck that means (clicking on the article didn't illuminate it for me, sorry) but Wikis that their maintainers have lost interest in become overrun by spam pretty quickly and if they just disable edits instead it's not any more useful than a blog (arguably worse since a blog post is at least intended to be tied to a specific moment in time while Wiki articles are meant to be eternally current).
WaitWaitWha 2y ago
Although I am not fond of the fixed flow of blogs, I have yet to find a "wiki" or similar mind-map-like tool that allows me to write better interconnected, non-linear writing that also works with a static site. Any ideas?
- audiodude 2y ago
  https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/ maybe?
- wonger_ 2y ago
  Tiddlywiki https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/ is good at cross-linking notes and publishing to the web. Consider writing plain HTML and calling it a digital garden, so you aren't locked into the chronological feed blog mindset. Maybe Obsidian Publish? https://obsidian.md/publish#:~:text=Explore%20Publish%20sites%20by%20the%20Obsidian%20community https://obsidian.md/publish#:~:text=Explore%20Publish%20site... Although it's a paid service and it seems a little clunky.
  - rcarmo 2y ago
    Tiddlywiki suffers a lot from being heavily JS-based.
- microtonal 2y ago
  Obsidian with Quartz: https://quartz.jzhao.xyz https://quartz.jzhao.xyz
  - rcarmo 2y ago
    Quartz completely breaks down with very large sites since it does client-side search, making it really hard to find things. It’s still too young.
nmz 2y ago
A blog is personal a wiki is not.
- j3s 2y ago
  not by definition, just by traditional usage https://xxiivv.com https://xxiivv.com is a wiki. it’s also very personal.
- mikae1 2y ago
  They are both technologies that are actively used to house personal content.
- rcarmo 2y ago
  My personal website would disagree with that, seeing as it is a wiki.
Shank 2y ago
I really love the idea of keeping a wiki, but for the same reasons j3s self-hosts a single binary for the blog, none of the wiki software that exists is particularly appealing to host and it sounds like a relatively large amount of work to build something like this from scratch.
gritzko 2y ago
Within my current project, I use a special C dialect. So, I have to write a lot of explanatory text for those who dare to use it. And even in solo projects, I have been in situations when I had to check my own docs to understand what's going on. As a result, my project is effectively also a wiki: https://replicated.wiki/abc/ https://replicated.wiki/abc/ https://github.com/gritzko/librdx/tree/master/abc https://github.com/gritzko/librdx/tree/master/abc The idea is to put motivational and explanatory text into the parallel wiki, while all the API docs stay in the code the normal way. These are seriously different things. The next step to unit tests all the code docs. Or, the other way around, to document tests to make them joy to read. That is the only way to solve doc rot. Overall, I am trying to get as close to Literate programming as practically possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming Because code is hypertext, IDE is a browser.
OuterVale 2y ago
Perhaps the greatest contributor to the philosophy behind my own site is taken from the website of Wendy Carlos. Her site houses a page describing how her website ‘lives’: [1] > I’m happy to report that this page (like most housework) will never be finished. It is a living document that grows and matures, just like most of real life. It is not a “work in progress”, for this would imply not much intrinsic value until that magic day it is completed. > A novel is a work of art that, once completed may continue to exist forever in that finished state. An encyclopedia must be published at regular intervals to reflect new information gathered since the day it was published. Periodicals are timely only when first printed, then fall behind the times – get the latest issue to keep up. The technology behind web documents allows us to update information as often as is necessary. In this context, publishing dates become an outdated concept. > While it is possible to “finish” a web document, the fixed information becomes stagnant, thus abolishing any desire for a return visit. This is something I call a cob-web page. [1]: https://www.wendycarlos.com/live.html https://www.wendycarlos.com/live.html
arjie 2y ago
I’m sure it will come to bite me in the ass one day but my personal site is a wiki written in the style of website that I’d write as a teenager: random updates about things and my life without any overlying theme or brand. I just write what I think, sticking my Blog entries under the Blog category and posting things haphazardly otherwise. Other things I do that one doesn’t these days but you’d be eager to do in the past is that I’m public about my life. Funnily enough, it was someone else’s comment about Wikipedia deleting their article (which I did manage to recover) that pointed me to a Japanese mathematician. His website filled me with such nostalgia. There were all these stories of his life and things like that. We used to put things like that on the Internet. The one thing I did miss back then was the ability to make small updates to people’s websites to fix typos and so on. So my website is a wiki (it’s just Mediawiki). It’s been vandalized before by bots but I make nightly backups to R2 so I just dump and restart if things get ugly. Otherwise, it’s been fine. One thing that might be fun is if someone one day happens upon my site and feels that sensation of looking at someone’s lived life.
- skrebbel 2y ago
  Hey I enjoyed reading your site! Also, notably, it made me aware of the word "Bundeshausfrau" which is my new second-favourite German word (after the un-dethroneable "Sitzpinkler").
  - sshine 2y ago
    I’m a sucker for “Krankenhaus!”
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - arjie 2y ago
    I like saying "sitzen, nicht spritzen" to amuse myself, which is a close relative. But the funniest thing is that I thought I'd coined Bundeshausfrau in that post but it's apparently the most obvious choice to express the concept in German because it's been used at least a decade ago (and possible more)! Well, TIL.
INTPenis 2y ago
That's complete rubbish. Information rots, whether it sits in a blog or a wiki doesn't matter. A blog can be updated, can show its last updated date, just as a wiki does. The statement hits home with me because over the past 20 years I have actually gone back and forth between having a wiki as a personal website and now finally back at blog again. I find that markdown + tags is the best way to organize my personal knowledge base that I call a blog. My attempts at using Wikis always felt overkill.
- daymanstep 2y ago
  do you find that a blog (with the web interface) adds any value over just having a git repository of markdown files that have tags inside?
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    I'm guessing the main advantage is navigational structure - while I agree that can be overdone, and I practice very minimal navigation on my own 'blog', I think some amount can make the pile of markdown files easier to read.
  - INTPenis 2y ago
    Yes it adds value to see an interface, funny you should mention that specifically because recently I was on the job market and I created a Hugo blog where each job I applied for was one post. So I could keep track of when I applied, how, interviews, results and so forth in one markdown file. Then when it was time to report my job applications to the government so I would get money I just ran hugo server and looked at them graphically and chronologically.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- hogdanish 2y ago
  I interpreted the poem less as a literal manifesto against the practicality of blogs and more as a metaphor for how the format impacts us psychologically. Blogs, being chronological and linear, feel a bit disposable—you post and move on—which promotes rot. Wikis, on the other hand, are dynamic and interconnected, inviting ongoing growth and freshness. I still don't really really agree with that either, though. I tried swapping out my simple static blog for a MediaWiki instance and quickly realized why you don't see many people doing that anymore. Maintaining a "complex abyss of ever-evolving thoughts" and actually writing stuff are often mutually exclusive
hogdanish 2y ago
Lovely poem, but I don't 100% agree with the idea that the wiki possesses some kind of ethereal, spiritual advantage over the blog. The post-SEO internet has been unkind to all forms of online writing, and the wiki has been an equally effective vessel for the proliferation of rot as any other (looking at you, Fandom). From a practical perspective: Blogs may rot, but wikis decay. Larger projects with established community manpower may not struggle with offsetting the maintenance and complexity that traditional wikis demand. For personal writing, however, the burden of preventing decay falls entirely on the author- and it's not a trivial burden. Like others have mentioned, there seems to be an absence of great wiki software offerings that do a great job of mitigating said burden. The few I have tried introduced an inherent complexity and maintenance overhead that significantly detracted from the core activity of writing. Regardless, I'm hoping that it's just an engineering problem that has yet to be solved instead of an unavoidable characteristic of the medium itself. I would love for the wiki to make a big comeback.
1dom 2y ago
I like the sentiment of this, I feel it very strongly. But I also think this is just another expression of personal website anxiety. This is the same sentiment that lead to the boom in digital gardens, notion, PKM etc. I haven't accepted it yet, but I think people who host their own personal websites need to accept that they're hosting a personal website, and it's going to change over time as they change. People already know and accept and see that as a feature of a personal website. It's necessary as the tech changes too, a personal website with the latest and greatest tech from 20 years ago renders like garbage in a modern browser. I really don't mean to sound mean, and I do sincerely empathise and sympathise with the author, because every year or 2, I have the same revelation that my website hasn't been updated in a while, and it's not my fault, it my platform just isn't technically correct and it's too restrictive and _that's_ what's stopping me being consistent on my personal website. But let's be honest, that's a me problem for not updating it or adding to it. Every year or 2 for the past 20 years, I'm sure many of us could write the same "<my current website structure> rots. <The one I had an epiphany about a few days ago> wait".
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  > a personal website with the latest and greatest tech from 20 years ago renders like garbage in a modern browser The irony being that one without the "latest and greatest" tech would still render fine - tbh, even in 2005, some of this "latest" tech was recognised as not the "greatest". Examples? I don't think daringfireball.net has changed that much since 2002, neither blog.codinghorror.com since 2004.
  - Macha 2y ago
    Coding Horror has moved from self hosted movable type to hosted movable type to Ghost. The theme has been deliberately kept relatively consistent, but the tech has had significant changes.
    - Macha 2y ago
      That didn't last long. The timing is incredibly funny as just 4 days after making this post, Coding Horror _did_ redesign, more significantly different this time.
kqr 2y ago
Counterpoint: I subscribe to many blog RSS feeds because the content comes in a useful format and appropriate cadence. I have never subscribed to a wiki to get regular updates for it.
mro_name 2y ago
frankly I find rot quite appealing. Rotting produces compost, fertiliser. And at the same time makes way for new things. Great, isn't it?
- hogdanish 2y ago
  The expression "polishing a turd" comes to mind.
openrisk 2y ago
After the history-making success of wikipedia the wiki movement has unfortunately stagnated. Wikinomics [1] is yet another early vision of the digital society that did not come to pass. The reasons as always quite complex: from the general decline of the public internet due to centralization / enshittification (and now wholesale appropriation), to poor technology choices and missing value propositions that could induce the next wave of adoption and development. Yet there is still no tangibly better alternative vision for open source knowledge management, especially if of the collaborative kind. One interesting direction - yet after more than a decade still largely in embryonic phase as far as broad adoption - is wikibase [2]. It runs as an extension of mediawiki and makes it relatively painless to integrate structured data in a semantic web style (e.g. [3] for an example of integrating veris [4] data). Its not clear if the wiki era is permanently dead or it just waits for some rain to blossom again. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikinomics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikinomics [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikibase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikibase [3] https://www.openriskmanual.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Item:Q52 https://www.openriskmanual.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/It... [4] https://github.com/vz-risk/veris https://github.com/vz-risk/veris
- diggan 2y ago
  > One interesting direction - yet after more than a decade still largely in embryonic phase as far as broad adoption - is wikibase [2]. It runs as an extension of mediawiki and makes it relatively painless to integrate structured data in a semantic web style (e.g. [3] for an example of integrating veris [4] data). I agree a lot with this. As a person who speaks many languages, something that gets evident very early is that isn't one "The Web", but many webs like English Web, Spanish Web, Portuguese Web and so on. This is extra noticeable on Wikipedia, since many articles exist in many languages. The drawback is that sometimes information is split across the languages, so someone speaking English, Spanish and Swedish can sometimes build a more complete picture from just one Wikipedia article, if the data isn't in the other article languages. Enter Wikidata+Wikibase, which makes the knowledge itself trans-language, and instead only the definition/value names need translated, but the composition itself is language-agnostic. If this imaginary article with separate info in three languages for one article could all use Wikidata as a base, they can all share the same knowledge and make sure that people who only speak one of the languages, come out with the same understanding. Basically, Wikidata if successful, will multiply the knowledge on the web!
pixelmonkey 2y ago
Obligatory meme: https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/ https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/ I'm personally in the top left corner and bottom right corner at the same time, which is sort of funny. I have used WordPress since 2004-2005, and I've also written a Python static site generator before using Flask + Frozen-Flask[1]. I've also made stops through tools like Sphinx, Hugo, Gatsby, and VitePress[2]. But my personal site continues to run WordPress[3]. I think I'd prefer something like VitePress these days for a technical documentation site. It has a lot going for it for that use case. And it feels built to last. On true wikis that one can self-host, I recently learned that MediaWiki with a reasonable theme like Citizen[4] is a nice choice for an open source powered private wiki. Although I do find the Mediawiki markup language a little cumbersome versus simpler markup languages like reST or Markdown/MyST in the Python community (or GitHub-Flavored Markdown or Asciidoc supported elsewhere). But Mediawiki has a lot of nice features -- after all, Mediawiki powers Wikipedia. The theme makes it work properly on mobile, adds a little more structure for automatic ToC, and makes content editing a bit simpler. It still isn't nearly as polished as commercial wiki-like software (e.g. Notion) but it's better than open source wikis used to be. On the subject of the blog post, I think bit-rot or info-rot is the natural order of things. The kind of software you run isn't going to change those facts. And if you're curating knowledge about technical computing subjects (that isn't about durable topics like, say, C and Linux system calls), you should expect exponential decay. I do find it kind of amusing how many tools and frameworks developers have created for making it easier to edit HTML pages, though. Truly a foundational 21st century problem that deserves a technical solution that can last for decades without itself bit-rotting. [1]: https://frozen-flask.readthedocs.io/ https://frozen-flask.readthedocs.io/ [2]: https://vitepress.dev/ https://vitepress.dev/ [3]: https://amontalenti.com/archive https://amontalenti.com/archive [4]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Citizen https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Citizen
jefftk 2y ago
As both a reader and a writer I disagree: * A blog post is a snapshot: what did the author think at the time they wrote the post? If they change their mind or learn more, they write a new post and link forward and backwards. I know how to write for this environment (write what I think now, try to write things I'll feel glad to have written later) and how to work with things other people have written (consider the date, it's just one person's view). * A wiki page is unclear. When should it be updated? How much should I trust that it was up-to-date as of the last-updated date vs that just being when someone fixed a typo? A few wikis and sites with wiki-like approaches (Wikipedia, gwern.net) manage to handle this well, but I think it's generally much more difficult and rot-prone.
- xemdetia 2y ago
  I think in modern times because you don't see it the same way you forget that a newspaper, magazine, encyclopedia, academic paper, and a reference book are different for a reason and do not have to be unified, and there was no need to do so. Having a way to publish contemporary articles vs building an effective knowledge reference are different goals. The physical print production was part of the language of intent. A blog with a contemporary note of an obscure Ubuntu upgrade issue is often the best way to describe it whereas a wiki with a current reference of now the fundamental baseline of relevance. A wiki eschews the most relevant details the same way an encyclopedia focuses on the core points. As a writer I need many formats and as a reader I cherish many formats.
- notpushkin 2y ago
  And a blog could be updated as many times as you want! Suppose you wrote a post with some kind of a guide a few years that still gets a lot of views — you can still update that, and even re-publish it on your homepage. This style is more popular with some media sites — e.g. journal.tinkoff.ru (in Russian) does this with their “instructional” posts — but I think it should work for personal blogs just as well.
  - 3eb7988a1663 2y ago
    For the love of deity, just include timestamps. It is incredible to me how many blogs do not include a date created or modified.
kmfrk 2y ago
Static blogs and dynamic blogs are also leagues apart given how much less is susceptible to rot. GitHub.io blogs feel like something that came and went, but maybe the SEO wasn't there enough for people to stick with it. The resurgence of newsletters is also another revitalization of blogs with better syndication (e-mail over RSS). Probably not a great time to operate a WordPress blog though.
anthk 2y ago
Gopher holes and Gemini capsules don't. Also, there are tons of small blogs out there.
scoofy 2y ago
If you play golf and like wikis, please do me a solid and add your course (no matter how small) to https://golfcourse.wiki https://golfcourse.wiki It was a covid project of mine, and it's growing even if many people don't know that it exists.

196 points by j3s 2y ago

I quite like the "Wiki" on my site. It's half blog, half wiki. The entries can be dated. They are presented chronologically. Navigation metadata is assigned to each entry. But not every entry appears on the blog feed. I can link between entries like [[link]]. Each entry tracks the links to and from it. The best of both worlds I think ^^

simonw 2y ago
I'm contemplating adding something like that to my https://simonwillison.net https://simonwillison.net site at the moment: most of my content works great as a blog but I like the idea of having some content that's more "page like" which I can continually update - things like a list of currently active projects.
- smnrg 2y ago
  Julian.com (Julian Shapiro) is a great, hyper-focused example of regularly refined pages.
- internetter 2y ago
  If you'd like a reference implementation, it's all under AGPL here: https://github.com/boehs/site https://github.com/boehs/site :)
- PhilippGille 2y ago
  Martin Fowler calls it Bliki: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/ https://martinfowler.com/bliki/
  - rcarmo 2y ago
    Yeah, although the form predates the term.
wakawaka28 2y ago
Dates are very helpful, especially for information about software.

rpcope1 2y ago

Wikis are great, but it feels like outside of Wikipedia they've been dying. I wish bashhackers was still with us, and regret even more that there's not other large old school wikis for things like systems software development or other programming languages (or even a newer take on the original WikiWikiWeb). I guess maybe some of it is GitHub pages or that weird GitHub wiki thing now, but they don't really feel the same.

rcarmo 2y ago
My blog is actually a wiki, and has been going for 23 years. There are quite a few other old farts^W^Wvintage bloggers out there with similar setups.
crooked-v 2y ago
I feel like that's been helped along culturally by fandom.com buying out various independent wikis and then shittifying them to the point of unusability.
- TkTech 2y ago
  There's an ongoing mini-revolution against Fandom, with the wikis that have the manpower moving away to other platforms like wiki.gg, WeirdGloop, or just self-hosted. Minecraft, WoW, Runescape, LoL, etc.
  - j3s 2y ago
    yep! i recommend indie wiki buddy for discovering these sorts of community-led wikis. the extension recognizes when you’re on fandom and recommends equivalent community wikis instead fandom will not take down old wikis (that’d be bad for SEO), so the fandom content persists even after a full community migration. just one of the many shitty things that company does.
    - shnock 2y ago
      This? https://getindie.wiki/ https://getindie.wiki/ Thank you from a long-time hater of Fandom and PE-driven enshittification and lover of community-driven knowledge work

altairprime 2y ago

Note that the usage of “blog” in this poem has nothing to do with livejournals and pre-spam personal journal blogs in general; it’s referring to the post-indexing apocalypse brought on by SEO and Google reacting to ‘freshness’.

aaron695 2y ago

Great poetry. It's timely that Oxford 'academics' have no idea what 'brain rot' means but Urban Dictionary (A wiki) gets it right. https://corp.oup.com/word-of-the-year/ https://corp.oup.com/word-of-the-year/ https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Brainrot https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Brainrot Most Wikis don't work, it'd be interesting to work out what it takes. Starting list - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis Encyclopedia Dramatica (NSFW) is better than Conservapedia for instance.

scubbo 2y ago
> It's timely that Oxford 'academics' have no idea what 'brain rot' means but Urban Dictionary (A wiki) gets it right. I have never seen Brain Rot used consistently with any of the UD definitions, and always consistently with the OUP's definition.
- emodendroket 2y ago
  I agree with you. Also, Wiktionary is much more Wiki-like and a much better resource than Urban Dictionary.
- Macha 2y ago
  The front page of urban dictionary's definitions are all added post 2020, which fits since the urban dictionary usage is the way far more online members of gen z use it.

j3s 2y ago

ironically i posted this on my blog 3:

xenodium 2y ago

Doing my bit to bring pre-seo-driven, or just genuine blogging to the foreground. Just launched https://lmno.lol https://lmno.lol blogging platform (no tracking or ads here). Read blogs from anywhere. No JS required.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

shortrounddev2 2y ago

Any time I discover some new piece of coding information, or solve an obscure bug for which there is not a lot of common documentation, I write about it in my personal mediawiki server. Maybe some day when it has more content I'll host it publicly, but for now I find it more useful than a blog or a personal journal

topato 2y ago

Oh GOD! PLEASE don't kill vore.website!!! I very much appreciate that service! <3

j3s 2y ago
vore isn’t going anywhere <3 any features you’ve been itching for btw? thinking about spending a weekend on it soon.
- j3s 2y ago
  besides, wikis have RSS feeds too. gotta follow em from somewhere :)

emodendroket 2y ago

I don't know what the heck that means (clicking on the article didn't illuminate it for me, sorry) but Wikis that their maintainers have lost interest in become overrun by spam pretty quickly and if they just disable edits instead it's not any more useful than a blog (arguably worse since a blog post is at least intended to be tied to a specific moment in time while Wiki articles are meant to be eternally current).

WaitWaitWha 2y ago

Although I am not fond of the fixed flow of blogs, I have yet to find a "wiki" or similar mind-map-like tool that allows me to write better interconnected, non-linear writing that also works with a static site. Any ideas?

audiodude 2y ago
https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/ maybe?
wonger_ 2y ago
Tiddlywiki https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/ is good at cross-linking notes and publishing to the web. Consider writing plain HTML and calling it a digital garden, so you aren't locked into the chronological feed blog mindset. Maybe Obsidian Publish? https://obsidian.md/publish#:~:text=Explore%20Publish%20sites%20by%20the%20Obsidian%20community https://obsidian.md/publish#:~:text=Explore%20Publish%20site... Although it's a paid service and it seems a little clunky.
- rcarmo 2y ago
  Tiddlywiki suffers a lot from being heavily JS-based.
microtonal 2y ago
Obsidian with Quartz: https://quartz.jzhao.xyz https://quartz.jzhao.xyz
- rcarmo 2y ago
  Quartz completely breaks down with very large sites since it does client-side search, making it really hard to find things. It’s still too young.

nmz 2y ago

A blog is personal a wiki is not.

j3s 2y ago
not by definition, just by traditional usage https://xxiivv.com https://xxiivv.com is a wiki. it’s also very personal.
mikae1 2y ago
They are both technologies that are actively used to house personal content.
rcarmo 2y ago
My personal website would disagree with that, seeing as it is a wiki.

Shank 2y ago

I really love the idea of keeping a wiki, but for the same reasons j3s self-hosts a single binary for the blog, none of the wiki software that exists is particularly appealing to host and it sounds like a relatively large amount of work to build something like this from scratch.

gritzko 2y ago

Within my current project, I use a special C dialect. So, I have to write a lot of explanatory text for those who dare to use it. And even in solo projects, I have been in situations when I had to check my own docs to understand what's going on. As a result, my project is effectively also a wiki: https://replicated.wiki/abc/ https://replicated.wiki/abc/ https://github.com/gritzko/librdx/tree/master/abc https://github.com/gritzko/librdx/tree/master/abc The idea is to put motivational and explanatory text into the parallel wiki, while all the API docs stay in the code the normal way. These are seriously different things. The next step to unit tests all the code docs. Or, the other way around, to document tests to make them joy to read. That is the only way to solve doc rot. Overall, I am trying to get as close to Literate programming as practically possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming Because code is hypertext, IDE is a browser.

OuterVale 2y ago

Perhaps the greatest contributor to the philosophy behind my own site is taken from the website of Wendy Carlos. Her site houses a page describing how her website ‘lives’: [1] > I’m happy to report that this page (like most housework) will never be finished. It is a living document that grows and matures, just like most of real life. It is not a “work in progress”, for this would imply not much intrinsic value until that magic day it is completed. > A novel is a work of art that, once completed may continue to exist forever in that finished state. An encyclopedia must be published at regular intervals to reflect new information gathered since the day it was published. Periodicals are timely only when first printed, then fall behind the times – get the latest issue to keep up. The technology behind web documents allows us to update information as often as is necessary. In this context, publishing dates become an outdated concept. > While it is possible to “finish” a web document, the fixed information becomes stagnant, thus abolishing any desire for a return visit. This is something I call a cob-web page. [1]: https://www.wendycarlos.com/live.html https://www.wendycarlos.com/live.html

arjie 2y ago

I’m sure it will come to bite me in the ass one day but my personal site is a wiki written in the style of website that I’d write as a teenager: random updates about things and my life without any overlying theme or brand. I just write what I think, sticking my Blog entries under the Blog category and posting things haphazardly otherwise. Other things I do that one doesn’t these days but you’d be eager to do in the past is that I’m public about my life. Funnily enough, it was someone else’s comment about Wikipedia deleting their article (which I did manage to recover) that pointed me to a Japanese mathematician. His website filled me with such nostalgia. There were all these stories of his life and things like that. We used to put things like that on the Internet. The one thing I did miss back then was the ability to make small updates to people’s websites to fix typos and so on. So my website is a wiki (it’s just Mediawiki). It’s been vandalized before by bots but I make nightly backups to R2 so I just dump and restart if things get ugly. Otherwise, it’s been fine. One thing that might be fun is if someone one day happens upon my site and feels that sensation of looking at someone’s lived life.

skrebbel 2y ago
Hey I enjoyed reading your site! Also, notably, it made me aware of the word "Bundeshausfrau" which is my new second-favourite German word (after the un-dethroneable "Sitzpinkler").
- sshine 2y ago
  I’m a sucker for “Krankenhaus!”
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- arjie 2y ago
  I like saying "sitzen, nicht spritzen" to amuse myself, which is a close relative. But the funniest thing is that I thought I'd coined Bundeshausfrau in that post but it's apparently the most obvious choice to express the concept in German because it's been used at least a decade ago (and possible more)! Well, TIL.

INTPenis 2y ago

That's complete rubbish. Information rots, whether it sits in a blog or a wiki doesn't matter. A blog can be updated, can show its last updated date, just as a wiki does. The statement hits home with me because over the past 20 years I have actually gone back and forth between having a wiki as a personal website and now finally back at blog again. I find that markdown + tags is the best way to organize my personal knowledge base that I call a blog. My attempts at using Wikis always felt overkill.

daymanstep 2y ago
do you find that a blog (with the web interface) adds any value over just having a git repository of markdown files that have tags inside?
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  I'm guessing the main advantage is navigational structure - while I agree that can be overdone, and I practice very minimal navigation on my own 'blog', I think some amount can make the pile of markdown files easier to read.
- INTPenis 2y ago
  Yes it adds value to see an interface, funny you should mention that specifically because recently I was on the job market and I created a Hugo blog where each job I applied for was one post. So I could keep track of when I applied, how, interviews, results and so forth in one markdown file. Then when it was time to report my job applications to the government so I would get money I just ran hugo server and looked at them graphically and chronologically.
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    [deleted]
hogdanish 2y ago
I interpreted the poem less as a literal manifesto against the practicality of blogs and more as a metaphor for how the format impacts us psychologically. Blogs, being chronological and linear, feel a bit disposable—you post and move on—which promotes rot. Wikis, on the other hand, are dynamic and interconnected, inviting ongoing growth and freshness. I still don't really really agree with that either, though. I tried swapping out my simple static blog for a MediaWiki instance and quickly realized why you don't see many people doing that anymore. Maintaining a "complex abyss of ever-evolving thoughts" and actually writing stuff are often mutually exclusive

hogdanish 2y ago

Lovely poem, but I don't 100% agree with the idea that the wiki possesses some kind of ethereal, spiritual advantage over the blog. The post-SEO internet has been unkind to all forms of online writing, and the wiki has been an equally effective vessel for the proliferation of rot as any other (looking at you, Fandom). From a practical perspective: Blogs may rot, but wikis decay. Larger projects with established community manpower may not struggle with offsetting the maintenance and complexity that traditional wikis demand. For personal writing, however, the burden of preventing decay falls entirely on the author- and it's not a trivial burden. Like others have mentioned, there seems to be an absence of great wiki software offerings that do a great job of mitigating said burden. The few I have tried introduced an inherent complexity and maintenance overhead that significantly detracted from the core activity of writing. Regardless, I'm hoping that it's just an engineering problem that has yet to be solved instead of an unavoidable characteristic of the medium itself. I would love for the wiki to make a big comeback.

1dom 2y ago

I like the sentiment of this, I feel it very strongly. But I also think this is just another expression of personal website anxiety. This is the same sentiment that lead to the boom in digital gardens, notion, PKM etc. I haven't accepted it yet, but I think people who host their own personal websites need to accept that they're hosting a personal website, and it's going to change over time as they change. People already know and accept and see that as a feature of a personal website. It's necessary as the tech changes too, a personal website with the latest and greatest tech from 20 years ago renders like garbage in a modern browser. I really don't mean to sound mean, and I do sincerely empathise and sympathise with the author, because every year or 2, I have the same revelation that my website hasn't been updated in a while, and it's not my fault, it my platform just isn't technically correct and it's too restrictive and _that's_ what's stopping me being consistent on my personal website. But let's be honest, that's a me problem for not updating it or adding to it. Every year or 2 for the past 20 years, I'm sure many of us could write the same "<my current website structure> rots. <The one I had an epiphany about a few days ago> wait".

oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
> a personal website with the latest and greatest tech from 20 years ago renders like garbage in a modern browser The irony being that one without the "latest and greatest" tech would still render fine - tbh, even in 2005, some of this "latest" tech was recognised as not the "greatest". Examples? I don't think daringfireball.net has changed that much since 2002, neither blog.codinghorror.com since 2004.
- Macha 2y ago
  Coding Horror has moved from self hosted movable type to hosted movable type to Ghost. The theme has been deliberately kept relatively consistent, but the tech has had significant changes.
  - Macha 2y ago
    That didn't last long. The timing is incredibly funny as just 4 days after making this post, Coding Horror _did_ redesign, more significantly different this time.

kqr 2y ago

Counterpoint: I subscribe to many blog RSS feeds because the content comes in a useful format and appropriate cadence. I have never subscribed to a wiki to get regular updates for it.

mro_name 2y ago

frankly I find rot quite appealing. Rotting produces compost, fertiliser. And at the same time makes way for new things. Great, isn't it?

hogdanish 2y ago
The expression "polishing a turd" comes to mind.

openrisk 2y ago

After the history-making success of wikipedia the wiki movement has unfortunately stagnated. Wikinomics [1] is yet another early vision of the digital society that did not come to pass. The reasons as always quite complex: from the general decline of the public internet due to centralization / enshittification (and now wholesale appropriation), to poor technology choices and missing value propositions that could induce the next wave of adoption and development. Yet there is still no tangibly better alternative vision for open source knowledge management, especially if of the collaborative kind. One interesting direction - yet after more than a decade still largely in embryonic phase as far as broad adoption - is wikibase [2]. It runs as an extension of mediawiki and makes it relatively painless to integrate structured data in a semantic web style (e.g. [3] for an example of integrating veris [4] data). Its not clear if the wiki era is permanently dead or it just waits for some rain to blossom again. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikinomics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikinomics [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikibase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikibase [3] https://www.openriskmanual.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Item:Q52 https://www.openriskmanual.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/It... [4] https://github.com/vz-risk/veris https://github.com/vz-risk/veris

diggan 2y ago
> One interesting direction - yet after more than a decade still largely in embryonic phase as far as broad adoption - is wikibase [2]. It runs as an extension of mediawiki and makes it relatively painless to integrate structured data in a semantic web style (e.g. [3] for an example of integrating veris [4] data). I agree a lot with this. As a person who speaks many languages, something that gets evident very early is that isn't one "The Web", but many webs like English Web, Spanish Web, Portuguese Web and so on. This is extra noticeable on Wikipedia, since many articles exist in many languages. The drawback is that sometimes information is split across the languages, so someone speaking English, Spanish and Swedish can sometimes build a more complete picture from just one Wikipedia article, if the data isn't in the other article languages. Enter Wikidata+Wikibase, which makes the knowledge itself trans-language, and instead only the definition/value names need translated, but the composition itself is language-agnostic. If this imaginary article with separate info in three languages for one article could all use Wikidata as a base, they can all share the same knowledge and make sure that people who only speak one of the languages, come out with the same understanding. Basically, Wikidata if successful, will multiply the knowledge on the web!

pixelmonkey 2y ago

Obligatory meme: https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/ https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/ I'm personally in the top left corner and bottom right corner at the same time, which is sort of funny. I have used WordPress since 2004-2005, and I've also written a Python static site generator before using Flask + Frozen-Flask[1]. I've also made stops through tools like Sphinx, Hugo, Gatsby, and VitePress[2]. But my personal site continues to run WordPress[3]. I think I'd prefer something like VitePress these days for a technical documentation site. It has a lot going for it for that use case. And it feels built to last. On true wikis that one can self-host, I recently learned that MediaWiki with a reasonable theme like Citizen[4] is a nice choice for an open source powered private wiki. Although I do find the Mediawiki markup language a little cumbersome versus simpler markup languages like reST or Markdown/MyST in the Python community (or GitHub-Flavored Markdown or Asciidoc supported elsewhere). But Mediawiki has a lot of nice features -- after all, Mediawiki powers Wikipedia. The theme makes it work properly on mobile, adds a little more structure for automatic ToC, and makes content editing a bit simpler. It still isn't nearly as polished as commercial wiki-like software (e.g. Notion) but it's better than open source wikis used to be. On the subject of the blog post, I think bit-rot or info-rot is the natural order of things. The kind of software you run isn't going to change those facts. And if you're curating knowledge about technical computing subjects (that isn't about durable topics like, say, C and Linux system calls), you should expect exponential decay. I do find it kind of amusing how many tools and frameworks developers have created for making it easier to edit HTML pages, though. Truly a foundational 21st century problem that deserves a technical solution that can last for decades without itself bit-rotting. [1]: https://frozen-flask.readthedocs.io/ https://frozen-flask.readthedocs.io/ [2]: https://vitepress.dev/ https://vitepress.dev/ [3]: https://amontalenti.com/archive https://amontalenti.com/archive [4]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Citizen https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Citizen

jefftk 2y ago

As both a reader and a writer I disagree: * A blog post is a snapshot: what did the author think at the time they wrote the post? If they change their mind or learn more, they write a new post and link forward and backwards. I know how to write for this environment (write what I think now, try to write things I'll feel glad to have written later) and how to work with things other people have written (consider the date, it's just one person's view). * A wiki page is unclear. When should it be updated? How much should I trust that it was up-to-date as of the last-updated date vs that just being when someone fixed a typo? A few wikis and sites with wiki-like approaches (Wikipedia, gwern.net) manage to handle this well, but I think it's generally much more difficult and rot-prone.

xemdetia 2y ago
I think in modern times because you don't see it the same way you forget that a newspaper, magazine, encyclopedia, academic paper, and a reference book are different for a reason and do not have to be unified, and there was no need to do so. Having a way to publish contemporary articles vs building an effective knowledge reference are different goals. The physical print production was part of the language of intent. A blog with a contemporary note of an obscure Ubuntu upgrade issue is often the best way to describe it whereas a wiki with a current reference of now the fundamental baseline of relevance. A wiki eschews the most relevant details the same way an encyclopedia focuses on the core points. As a writer I need many formats and as a reader I cherish many formats.
notpushkin 2y ago
And a blog could be updated as many times as you want! Suppose you wrote a post with some kind of a guide a few years that still gets a lot of views — you can still update that, and even re-publish it on your homepage. This style is more popular with some media sites — e.g. journal.tinkoff.ru (in Russian) does this with their “instructional” posts — but I think it should work for personal blogs just as well.
- 3eb7988a1663 2y ago
  For the love of deity, just include timestamps. It is incredible to me how many blogs do not include a date created or modified.

kmfrk 2y ago

Static blogs and dynamic blogs are also leagues apart given how much less is susceptible to rot. GitHub.io blogs feel like something that came and went, but maybe the SEO wasn't there enough for people to stick with it. The resurgence of newsletters is also another revitalization of blogs with better syndication (e-mail over RSS). Probably not a great time to operate a WordPress blog though.

anthk 2y ago

Gopher holes and Gemini capsules don't. Also, there are tons of small blogs out there.

scoofy 2y ago

If you play golf and like wikis, please do me a solid and add your course (no matter how small) to https://golfcourse.wiki https://golfcourse.wiki It was a covid project of mine, and it's growing even if many people don't know that it exists.