User:Sj/wikilog

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is a disambiguation page. For the mathematical function, see wikilog (mathematics). For the medical condition, see wikilog syndrome.
A popular wiki-logo, not to be confused with a wikilog

A wikilog (or wikilogue in the Queen's English) is a collection of "nodes" – including notes, essays, and discussions — bound together in a wiki. In this it is similar to a notebook, journal, or ship's log. A wikilog often begins life as the output of a small group of people, but is publicly editable. Individual entries are often written by only one or two people; in this, it is similar to a monolog[ue] or dialog[ue].

Wikilogs often specialize in fine granularity of subject matter, with separate nodes for each variation on a theme. They also tend to offer multiple views of their content, each organized along different lines.

History[edit]

Wikilogs have been in existence since the first wiki was created in 1995. Since the advent of the "blog" meme in 1999, wikilogs have begun to include explicit timestamps and reverse-chronological views.

Wikilogs are in theory suitable venues for massively-parallel personal journals, think-tanks, photologs, histories, and opinion columns. In practice, however, only the last of these has emerged from large wikilogs (see for instance the original wiki, c2:Ward's Wiki, and its sibling MeatballWiki). Wikis are more often used to produce focused works -- collections of satire, proposals, manuals, and other reference works. For prominent examples of each, see Uncyclopedia, <any corporate wiki>, <any open-source software wiki>, and Wikitravel.

A modern example using templating is Sj's Wikilog, about "all things Wikipedia" and some that are not.

Mutant etymologies[edit]

The use of the term "klog" to refer to a wikilog is too rare to be considered a neologism, preemptively deprecated, and should be avoided.