MeatballWiki
Wiki dedicated to online communities
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
MeatballWiki is a wiki dedicated to online communities, network culture, and hypermedia.[2] Containing a record of experience on running wikis, it is intended for "discussion about wiki philosophy, wiki culture, instructions and observations."[3]
| |
Type of site | Wiki |
|---|---|
| Created by | Sunir Shah |
| URL | meatballwiki |
| Launched | 2000 |
| Current status | Active (Read-only archive from 2013 to March 2021) |
Content license | None (Content is copyrighted by MeatballWiki or respective authors.)[1] |
According to founder Sunir Shah, it ran on "a hacked-up version of UseModWiki".[4] In April 2013, after several spam attacks and a period of downtime, the site was made read-only.[5] In March 2021, the site was de-spammed and reopened for editing as part of a rebuilding effort alongside Ward's Wiki and Community Wiki.[6]
Founding
MeatballWiki was started in 2000 by Sunir Shah, a forum administrator from Ontario, Canada, on Clifford Adams's Internet domain usemod.com.[7] MeatballWiki was created as a place for discussion about Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb and its operation, which were beyond the scope of WikiWikiWeb.[3] As Sunir Shah stated in the WikiWikiWeb page referring to MeatballWiki: "Community discussions about how to run the community itself should be left here. Abstract discussions, or objective analyses of community are encouraged on MeatballWiki."[4] Shah created this site "as a friendly fork of WikiWikiWeb." About the Meatball project, the website says: "The web, and media like it, looks like a big bowl of meatball spaghetti. You've got content – the meatballs – linked together with the spaghetti."[8]
Relationship to wiki community
The original intent of MeatballWiki was to offer observations and opinions about wikis and their online communities, aiming to support online communities, culture and hypermedia.[citation needed]
In Good Faith Collaboration, Joseph M. Reagle Jr. describes MeatballWiki as "the wiki about wiki collaboration".[9] Being a community about communities, MeatballWiki became the launching point for other wiki-based projects and a general resource for broader wiki concepts, reaching "cult status".[2] It describes the general tendencies observed on wikis and other online communities, for example the life cycles of wikis and people's behavior on them.[7]
What differentiates MeatballWiki from many online meta-communities is that participants spend much of their time talking about sociology rather than technology, and when they do talk about technology, they do so in a social context.[10]
The MeatballWiki members created a "bus tour" through existing wikis.[11][12]
Barnstars – badges that wiki editors use to express appreciation for another editor's work – were invented on MeatballWiki and adopted by Wikipedia in 2003.[13]
Evgeny Morozov of Boston Review notes that another Wikipedia norm around voting may also have stemmed from MeatballWiki.[14]
