Jason Kottke’s remaindered links today point to a slick PDF presentation by Marc Rettig and Aradhana Goel illustrating design principles.

Of particular interest here is a case study of library redesign; these designers helped Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh transform from a cluttered headache into what looks like a perfectly pleasant place to find information.

The slides are worth clicking through, if only to gasp at the pre-transformation “reference desk.” I’m copying a few below:

I just installed a MediaWiki 1.4.7 package on Clayfox’s shared Unix box. It actually wasn’t such an ordeal, even for a non-techie. But its coding conventions and image processing are just different enough from SnipSnap to make me wade around through what seems like endless documentation. Whatever doesn’t bore me to death will make me stronger….

This way to ClayfoxWiki.

An essay by Clay Shirky, called “A Group Is Its Worst Enemy”, has been floating around for a couple of years - but I just ran across it. It’s an interesting meditation on group dynamics and social software, shaped by crushed hopes for Usenet as well as a book about neurotics thwarting group goals (by the psychoanalyst W.R. Bion: “Experiences in Groups“).

What comes across in the Shirky piece is a sense of fragility - the need to protect group rights against “sandbagging” individuals. This protection cuts against bromides of democracy, generally, and some tenets of wikiland, in particular. For example, Shirky on the rights of a group:

The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that’s quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in.

The essay also emphasizes the importance of reputation as a regulating principle - which, in turn, suggests that functioning collaboration depends on recurrent, accoutable identity. OK so I have to sign in and get recognized. What about ease of use? Full access? Equal rights? Nope, Shirky argues for the virtue of barriers: ” It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves.”

All in all, a forthright argument against anonymity, scalability, equality, and, perhaps most surprisingly in the context of software devoted to group interaction, ease:

Now, this pulls against the cardinal virtue of ease of use. But ease of use is wrong. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation…. The user of social software is the group, not the individual.

Not exactly the Wiki Way, is it?

It’s all in the visualization.

When I describe wikis to someone still grappling with the oddness of the word ‘wiki’, my description inevitably kicks into abstractions about joint authoring, organic development, networked interactivity. What is likely to lodge, in an innocent auditor’s mind, is an amorphous sense of wide-open vulnerability: You mean, anyone can change any page? - or Why would anyone want to risk having their work distorted/mangled/deleted?

Assurances about communal good will and self-policing don’t always reassure. It’s a world of vandalism, terrorism, and error; the Internet is never secure, the Web is never authoritative; without accountability there is no truth… und so weiter. Descriptions of ‘rollback’ functionality are more comforting to our skeptical strawman, but of course that’s just damage control.

So here’s a better picture. Back in 2003, the Collaborative User Experience Research Group at IBM began publishing some illustrations of wiki posting activity. Authors were assigned a range of colors, in order to track the influence of any given individual, revision activity, and information persistence in a collaborative environment. This tool, called History Flow, is now available as a download at IBM’s alphaWorks.

These are visualizations that are immediately graspable. Here’s an example of three persons contributing to one wiki page over the course of four versions. Their words are color-coded:

And here’s the same content, now shaded to show persistence. The oldest surviving content is darkest:

This all gets very interesting when the researchers visualize the activity of a particularly controversial page, such as Wikipedia’s entry for abortion. This page does indeed attract outright attacks and vandalism; it’s a wonder that such a contentious topic is at all viable as an ‘open’ forum. But History Flow shows how quickly a wiki can recover from sabotage - “so quickly that most users will never see is effects” (text and illustrations here). Here’s a chart of the ‘abortion’ page, charted by saved versions; the gaps represent deletions:

And here’s the same page, now represented across a time axis: the attacks on this page are, by this measure, pretty much undetectable:

May History Flow keep flowing, keep rendering snapshots of how wikis actually work. They can be reassuring, arresting, even beautiful, given the right colors.

A 2004 report on History Flow entitled Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with History Flow Visualizations, by Fernanda B. Viegas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kushal Dave, is posted here.