Mobile JWiki

On the side as of late I’ve been working with Tim Jore at Distant Shores Media to help them create ajaxy goodness for their MediaWiki-based site at http://door43.org that features free and open licensed contributed discipleship resources for everyone in every language, including an open Bible, open Bible School, open worship music, etc. Anyway, I’ve just released a new application for them that dynamically has the ability to turn their entire wiki into a mobile online/offline application.

So if you are using MediaWiki, or would like to mobilize someone else’s Web site or wiki, you can find the simple 1-2 pages of code here: https://github.com/rwadholm/Mobile-JWiki. The code can be put on any server anywhere (that supports PHP 5.3), and will create a mobile offline/online version of whatever site you point it  at (out of the box it works with MediaWiki) via PHP,  JQuery, JQuery Mobile, and HTML5 (and it works as well without javascript enabled, so for non-smartphones it’ll still serve up your mobile site just fine). Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but you could even use it to make your own mobile offline/online version of Wikipedia that’s hosted on your own server.

The real purpose, however, is to allow users of wikis in areas with spotty internet connectivity or expensive data plans to be able to learn on the go, using their phones, without a continually active internet connection.

wikiwiki world

The world is now open. And it is faster, thanks in part to wikis (wikiwiki is Hawaiin for “quickly”). Quickly indeed. The world of open wikis are extremely fast. Reading through the short history of wikis a person is prone to get travelling sickness from the speed, bumpiness, and fits and starts on the road to communal knowledge heaven. Wikis are collaborative by their very nature (read/write pages) thus making them prime examples of Web 2.0 (though precursors to today’s wikis existed for several years prior to the coining of the term “Web 2.0″ by Oreilly). Open wikis (like Wikipedia) go one step further. They not only open up editing to everyone on the planet, they also open up their content for reuse, abuse, and modification by anyone else on the planet. Knowledge is freed from being only the stomping ground of the elite. Knowledge is put at everyone’s fingertips. And knowledge is allowed to flow from everyone’s fingertips. This is “us” analyzing and defining “it”.

Can the wiki be trusted? Can we trust our “lifeline”? When certain academic elites proclaim Wikipedia and other similar open knowledge sources as unacceptable drivle, not worthy of anyone’s time, should we follow their advice and give up on the whole enterprise? If Steven Colbert can “troll” Wikipedia, if vandals and jokesters can deface this public property, should we not call a universal moratorium on academic use of such resources?

If a particular article cannot be trusted, and someone who knows that visits the site and views this article and then tells others about Wikipedia’s untrustworthiness, is not that very person guilty of the sin of omission? If you think an article sucks, rewrite it. If you notice an error, fix it. You are a human. Wikis are for and by humans. If you don’t fix it, but you do complain about it, are you any better then the person who complains about poverty and does nothing to remedy this problem? Millions of people reference Wikipedia every day. It is a service for humanity. Why complain when you can change it? Few things in the world are easier (or quicker) to change. If many in the academic world complain about the unscholarliness of certain articles in a wiki, I think their responsibility to the human race is to share their expertise. Or are they too afraid of the wiki? Or of losing their prestige? Or of seeing humanity grow and learn? If I went into a store and a patron helped me find what I was looking for I would be happy. If a store worker helped me, I would be even happier (because they have the added experience and expertise to find the things I need). Store workers should not complain about patrons helping other patrons. They should help themselves. Scholars should think about doing just this. Help the world, help yourself.

In this way the wiki becomes stronger. The wiki can and should become not only fast and friendly, but factual and fabulous (I couldn’t think of another appropriate “f” word). So long live the wikiwiki world!