Why Wiki?

By Brian Smither, BSEEE
IT Manager, AAAOM

The AAAOM has had a wiki for several months. The AAAOM’s IT department was asked to develop a way to invite its membership to educate and elucidate on the art and profession of AOM for the general public and for each other. The actual announcement of the wiki’s existence was delayed until some useful policies were developed that described its use and management.

A wiki is a place for collaboration. While the word “wiki” has no relation to the concept (“wiki” was found on a sign at a Hawaiian airport; it means “quick”), a wiki works best when you’re trying to develop a response to a question not easily asked, or where there’s a natural structure that’s not known in advance to what you need to know.

For questions like “Who does what and when?” we design a flowchart. For questions like “What are the task’s relationships to each other?” we use timeline chart. In any type of project, there are going to be questions like “If we agree to do this, where will we need more facts and figures?” A wiki provides the opportunity for someone in the field to add, “This part of the project has unintended consequences.”

People like to talk. It’s easy to talk. Many people also like to write. Did I just hear a loud snicker from the back row? Yes, I understand that even speaking well is not easy. And writing well is exacting and often difficult. It is great to have tools to help you get your thoughts together, to research what you don’t know, and to organize it all. By setting up and inviting all of you to use this wiki, we want to encourage that storytelling urge in all of us.

We want you, who wouldn't normally write, to find that writing can be rewarding, if not fun, even if you are not comfortable expressing your ideas in writing and even if you are not too keen on research. We want you to know that others are “out there” to augment and enhance your initial idea and that if the order of your sub-topics seem to jump all over the place, someone else can take care of that. While not overshadowing anyone’s contribution, creating a wiki can be a truly collaborative effort.

To write an article for The American Acupuncturist, the author must establish the context, say important and accurate things, and say them so that a wide variety of people in the field can understand what is said. This takes more time and effort than most people care to invest. But if, while reading someone else's work, you think, "Yeah, but there's this other point of view," then being able to add a compelling paragraph that says, "Here’s what’s missing" raises everyone’s awareness on the subject. There's a whole lot of this "Let me help” found on a wiki.

Wiki pages are very free-form. Across the whole wiki there is a structure, but on a given page, within the versatility of your command of your natural language, you can say whatever needs to be said. Wikis were created to make it easier for writers, i.e. a structure exists, but it isn't held to a high degree of organization. So generally, the feeling for a reader can often be one of foraging in a wilderness for tidbits of information.

Unless pre-planned in advance through the judicious use of tables of contents and lists of links, everything is often “all over the place” in a wiki. You start by searching with keywords and hope you hit upon an existing article. If an article has not yet been written containing the search words you use, the visitor is offered the opportunity to start a wiki page with the search word as the subject.

Some may find it hard to read wiki pages. As previously discussed, in wiki there's no single editor organizing the material for the reader. All the pages are collaborative. The structure is collaborative. The editing is collaborative. Thus what you get is access to people who had no voice before.

The people to whom we are giving voice, for instance, can contribute to the ongoing efforts to create a basis for nomenclature in the profession of acupuncture and Oriental medicine as well address the need to bring Eastern ideas and ideograms to a Western frame of reference. The AAAOM AcupediaOnline provides for a repository of somewhat dissimilar views of how an ideogram relates to its idea. All of a sudden you're talking to the people who “get it”, not the people who talk about the need for “getting it,” and that's a big distinction. When it comes down to it, a wiki is only effective if you invest the time and effort to make the users understand how to work in a collaborative environment, what that means for us, and for the project.

It seems like people fall into two camps when they visit a wiki for the first time. Either they fall in love with the abundant use of cross-references and topic links or they run away screaming. Truth is, many people have a hard time understanding at first how to find things or how to contribute. But once the first-timers see how easy it is to contribute to wiki pages, they can’t wait to let their opinions be known.

The AcupediaOnline wiki will be used to collaborate on the Nomenclature Project as defined at the AAAOM International Expo and Conference 2007 held in Portland, Oregon. The Nomenclature Debates at the 2006 Conference (Phoenix, Arizona) brought to light the severity and seriousness of the Eastern and Western medical communities language dissociation. A major conclusion to those debates proved that treatments provided by Western practitioners of Eastern medicines contain significant amounts of ambiguity.

Getting AcuPediaOnline up and running was the easy part. (The AAAOM’s IT department likes the easy parts.) The real test of AcuPediaOnline's value will be its continuous utilization. Perhaps what makes a wiki most compelling is both its democratic nature and its ability to capture the knowledge of those that contribute. In AcuPediaOnline you will not be barred from having your say, although through collaboration and instruction from the Nomenclature Debates moderator, you may be edited after the fact in order to enhance and streamline your contributions.

So this is the Why of the wiki, specifically of AAAOM’s AcuPediaOnline, and I’ve briefly mentioned the What of our wiki. Next month, the Qi-Unity Report will publish an article on the Who, When, and Where of AcuPediaOnline. Stay tuned.