I love words. I find deep meaning in their roots. An example of this curiosity was my exploration on 19 May 2018.
Tonight I was pondering the word "wiki". I have struggled with Ward's use of wiki for both his original wiki engine and his new federated wiki. While there are similarities of intention, the authoring experience is quite different.
I just wondered if the use of the term wiki for the federated wiki would confuse others who would associated it only with the knowledge platform originally created over twenty years ago.
Ward makes me struggle. That is a good thing.
Quick
Wiki:quick. Why? What really does "quick" mean? Well, it's an adjective, adverb, and a noun. It can mean fast. It can mean intelligent. But it also can mean alive.
Old English cwic, cwicu ‘alive, animated, alert,’ of Germanic origin; related to Dutch kwiek ‘sprightly’ and German keck ‘saucy,’ from an Indo-European root shared by Latin vivus ‘alive’ and Greek bios, zōē ‘life.’
When we think of wiki, we mostly think about it as a noun.
But I am beginning to wonder what might happen if we thought of wiki as a verb, because the fed wiki is more about the process of quick storytelling, then about a repository of shared knowledge (which was not Ward's original aspiration but is how most people think of it).
Just wondering...