# Wikis ## What **is** a wiki? Quite an amorphous term these days. > soft security, editability of both content + metadata, recent changes, permalinks, editable namespaces. A healthy dose of eventualism > > – SJ, Agora Discuss > Wiki is perhaps the only web idiom that is not a child of BBS culture. It derives historically from pre-web models of hypertext, with an emphasis on the pre. The immediate ancestor of wiki was a [[HyperCard]] stack maintained by Ward Cunningham that attempted to capture community knowledge among programmers. Its philosophical godfather was the dead-tree hypertext A Pattern Language written by Christopher Alexander in the 1970s. > > – [Can Blogs and Wiki Be Merged? | Hapgood](https://hapgood.us/2016/02/22/can-blogs-and-wiki-be-merged/) > Wiki iterates not through the creation of new posts, but through the refactoring of old posts. It shows not a mind in motion, but the clearest and fairest description of what that mind has (or more usually, what those minds have) arrived at. I t values reuse over reply, and links are not pointers to related conversations but to related ideas. > > – [Can Blogs and Wiki Be Merged? | Hapgood](https://hapgood.us/2016/02/22/can-blogs-and-wiki-be-merged/) ## Is a **personal** wiki an oxymoron? > What wiki brought to these models, which were personal to start with, was collaboration. Wiki values are often polar opposites of blogging values. **Personal voice is meant to be minimized**. Voices are meant to be merged. > > – [Can Blogs and Wiki Be Merged? | Hapgood](https://hapgood.us/2016/02/22/can-blogs-and-wiki-be-merged/) Not so true for the personal wiki. Maybe a personal wiki is wiki software but with different values for the output? > Rather than serial presentation, wiki values **treating pages as nodes that stand outside of any particular narrative**, and **attempt to be timeless rather than timebound reactions**. > > – [Can Blogs and Wiki Be Merged? | Hapgood](https://hapgood.us/2016/02/22/can-blogs-and-wiki-be-merged/) This is still true for personal wikis.