| URL | MeatballWiki.org |
|---|---|
| Type of site | Wiki |
| Created by | Sunir Shah |
| Launched | 2000 |
| Alexa rank | 360,791 (January 2012[update])[1] |
MeatballWiki is a wiki dedicated to online communities, network culture, and hypermedia.[2]
Founded in 2000, its original goal was to focus on collaborative hypermedia, but current topics range from intellectual property to cyberpunk to the confusion of URIs.
According to founder Sunir Shah, it runs "a hacked-up version of UseModWiki".[3]
Contents |
MeatballWiki was started in 2000 by Sunir Shah, a forum administrator from Ontario, Canada, on Clifford Adams's Internet domain usemod.com.[4] It began as a fork from the original WikiWikiWeb created by Ward Cunningham, in order to provide a place to have discussions about Wiki outside of the original WikiWikiWeb.[5]
Ward Cunningham created WikiWikiWeb with a primary focus on computer programming design patterns. While the scope of WikiWikiWeb was broad, users who strayed too far from the focus wanted to engage in discussions about the wiki itself and how it operated, referred to as WikiOnWiki discussions, were going beyond the scope of WikiWikiWeb.[6] MeatballWiki was therefore created as a place for such discussions. As Sunir Shah stated in the WikiWikiWeb page referring to MeatballWiki: “Community discussions about how to run the community itself should be left here. Abstract discussions, or objective analyses of community are encouraged on MeatballWiki.”[3]
MeatballWiki is located on Clifford Adams's Internet domain, usemod.com, on which Adams also runs the UseModWiki forum, which is a wiki about the UseModWiki wiki engine. MeatballWiki and UseModWiki are thus two separate wikis located on the same Internet domain and using identical UseModWiki software.[4] For most of 2001, UseModWiki was also used to run all versions of Wikipedia.[7]
The original intent of MeatballWiki was to offer observations and opinions about wikis and their online communities, with the intent of helping online communities, culture and hypermedia. Being a community about communities, MeatballWiki has become the launching point for other wiki-based projects and a general resource for broader wiki concepts and has reached "cult status".[2] It describes the general tendencies observed on wikis and other on-line communities, for example the life cycles of wikis and people's behavior on them.[4]
What differentiates MeatballWiki from many online meta-communities is that participants spend much of their time talking about sociology rather than technology, and when they do talk about technology, they do so in a social context.[8]
The MeatballWiki members have created a “bus tour” of wikis.[9]