WikiSym

Today was the first day of WikiSym. The Proceedings are online, though half the conference is an OpenSpace workshop and so won't have Proceedings until the workshop has proceeded.

It's a nice size for a symposium. There are apparently going to be lots of long faces about the turnout for Hypertext, which will be about the same size. Perspective matters.

Some initial thoughts:

• Odense is charming, but weirdly empty
• There's lots of smoked salmon around. I think that was caviar at lunch, too. I can live with that.
• Amazing bundles of wiki folk. The program chair is James Noble, whose early work on prototype inheritance is one of the main influences on the design of Tinderbox. I didn't know he did wiki's!
• I met Sunir Shah, whose work I've been reading for years on various wikis. I had no idea whatsover about his age or affiliation, and that in itself is a remarkable wiki effect. He's working on a new project, startup-in-a-box.
• Everyone here is very interested in, and intelligent about, social aspects of wikis. A vast amount of that intelligence goes into spam control. Ward Cunningham was showing a nice quick-and-dirty visualization of activity that reveals lots of malicious patterns of usage. To have this many people and this much talent devoted to a war against vandalism -- a war no one is confident they can win -- is ludicrous. What price openness now?
• People here are very worried about the difficulty of wiki markup. Funny: Tinderbox has always had wysiwyg markup, and plenty of people keep wanting us to support Markdown or something of that ilk. Yes, repeat no?