KmWiki AAR

With tinges of sadness I'm announcing the closure of KmWiki - personal playground, collaborative repository and knowledge sharing experiment.

Over the past 6 years this collection has grown to more than 1500 pages (estimate).  We have seen intense debates, innovative collaborative writing, exploratory annealing, artful refactoring, savage vandalism - the good and bad sides of open, collective, internet spaces.

KmWiki has been used to:

• Teach post-graduate classes -      business intelligence, user-interface design
• Build student portfolios
• Explore cutting-edge Km      concepts - boundary objects, descriptive enumeration
• Collect links and resources -      Km tools and
• Prototype articles -      knowledge mapping, ontologies, CoPs
• Store notes and record      history

We were open and operating in mid 1999,  way before WikiPedia, before wiki became an established genre and migrated behind firewalls into the corporate domain.

The interesting things I learned from KmWiki, was the leverage of a 'switchyard' - an open, personal  web page for collecting and arranging links (now available via del.icio.us), the unexpected help from community members correcting or pointing to broken links, the difficulty of maintaining continual, open refactoring and the disappointment and destructive nature of internet script spammers.

KmWiki -  'Au revoir'

Comments

[David Locke]

It was the historic failure of "refactoring" that gave rise to the engineered. That more concerns became engineered to the point of the heavyweight methodologies, and the subsequent replacement of thee methodologies with the lightweigh and the return of refactoring is just an example of the endless feedback cycle you have talked about in other places.

Explication and the reimplication, the wiki and the scrip spammers is just a natural process. Value attracts all.

[Marshall Kirkpatrick]

This really seems like a shame. Is it just because of script spammers that your closing the wiki? For the sake of wikis everywhere, couldn't one of the oldest and best implement some kind of human authentication step? Is typekey sign-in enough to stop wiki spam? How about one of those "copy the letters in this box" features? I hate to see spam kill a wiki.

[Seb]

This is a shame. Any chance you can move the content over to a wiki that anyone can read but only a few can edit?

I'm considering options to transfer to a new host DCG

[Carol H Tucker]

Like many folks, I have enjoyed riding on your coattails, Denham. The banking links that I have kept are used quite often by me and by others and it will be difficult to find a home as warm and welcoming as your's has been!

[James Robertson]

Thanks so much for all the effort you've put into KmWiki over the years! I know that I've benefited from the unique collection of resources, and the world will be a poorer place for its passing...

James

James, Many thanks for those kind words DCG