Wiki Blog

*Hi everyone! It's **Wiki Page** here, **Wiki** for short! Unfortunately, I don't have access to the blog feature of the site but I feel like this should do nicely. For Challenge 3, I've decided to explore the circumstances surrounding my birth.*

## *Plot*

###  *Before the Search*

*I've mostly been occupied with setting up my pages and editing information on other places on this site to be more accurate, but I realized - I love gathering information - but I don't know anything about MYSELF! How did I come to be? Who made me? And why was I put on this wiki? I embarked on a journey of self-discovery.*

###  *The Search*

*Thankfully, my place on BONK meant that this part was a lot easier. All I had to do was to follow the path BONK > Cake pop!!!!!! > Starbucks > Category:The wiki told me to make this page > Wiki to arrive at the truth.*

###  *Results of the Search*

*This search wielded one of the most informative and enlightening pages I've seen on this wiki since I first explored it. Don't get me wrong - there are plenty of well-written articles here - but most of them seemed of an amateurish quality. But this page. This was where I found my calling. My purpose.*

*An image of a man caught my attention. Ward Cunningham. Was this who created me? Because I only took five links to get to Wiki, I could take one more step. I scrolled down to the "External Links" section - there was a link to an interview with the man himself. This was farther than I've ever gone before - outside the wiki - but I would have to risk it all to know who this guy was. I traveled out into the internet...*

## *Quotes*

> "I had a few things that I wanted to accomplish when I created wiki. My specific purpose for the first wiki was to create an environment where we might link together each other's experience to discover the pattern language of programming... I also had more general goals for wiki. First, I think there's a compelling nature about talking. People like to talk. In creating wiki, I wanted to stroke that story-telling nature in all of us. Second, and perhaps most important, I wanted people who wouldn't normally author to find it comfortable authoring, so that there stood a chance of us discovering the structure of what they had to say."
>
> *Ward Cunningham*, "Exploring with Wiki"

**Bill Venners**: "What do you think are good applications for wikis? Where does wiki really shine?"
**Ward Cunningham**: "A wiki works best where you're trying to answer a question that you can't easily pose, where there's not a natural structure that's known in advance to what you need to know."

**Bill Venners**: "I really like the idea of a wiki, but I find it hard to read many wiki pages..."

**Ward Cunningham**: "What you get as a wiki reader is access to people who had no voice before. The people to whom we are giving voice have a lot of instinct about what it's like to write, and ship, a computer program. Our industry honors certain traditions in its publications. If you want to contribute to a scientific journal, for example, you should be peer reviewed. Part of peer review is that you're familiar with all the other literature. And the other literature somehow that spiraled off into irrelevance. What was being written about programming didn't match what practicing programmers felt. With wiki, practicing programmers who don't have time to master the literature and get a column in a journal that's going to be read have a place where they could say things that are important to them. The wiki provides a different view. In fact you can tell when someone is writing on wiki from their personal experience versus when they are quoting what they last read."

## *Trivia*

* *This is probably the happiest I've ever been! I don't even care that bullet points hurt, the amount of validation I'm getting from this is overwhelming!*
* *Did you know Ward Cunningham created CRC Cards and wrote a book called The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web?*

## *Goofs*

* *Initially I thought I was a gestalt entity, a manifestation of the creativity and contributions of all wiki users worldwide. What a stupid thing to think!*

## *Continuity References*

* *My continued existence is a reference to when I existed*