Full Circle Online Interaction Blog: Wiki

Over at Fullcirc, Nancy White is thinking about Wikis and community:

Full Circle Online Interaction Blog: Wiki “Communities”

“Earlier this week I blogged about Ward Cunningham’s speach on wikis and community. This idea of “did the community create the wiki, or did the wiki create the community” has been rolling around in my head and bouncing the corners a bit.

My values and past experience usually lead me to conclude that it is always people who form communities, but his statement asked me to check my assumptions. And it helped me reframe the question to “did the community create the wiki, or did the wiki CATALYZE community.”

And I think it can work either way round, it all depends what you start off with. An existing community, such as ukcider can go on to create a wiki for itself, but in other circumstances an individual can create a wiki for a topic and that can then go on to gather a completely new community around it. In reality, there will probably always be a bit of both of these alternating processes going on more or less at the same time. I see no contradiction here, or rather.. I welcome it