Clancy's reminded me of yet another item on my Interweb To-Do List: resuscitate the wiki.

My wiki has a rather twisted history. Mister Boyfriend, the SysAdmin around here, was playing around with wikis as a mapping tool last Spring and set one up for me while he was at it. I became convinced that it would be an excellent tool for organizing my thesis chapter on the history of copyright. Because the university thesis guidelines demanded that I be the sole author of my thesis, I password-protected it with the intention of removing the password after my defense. (According to Matt Barton's article Embrace the Wiki Way, this is both a very good and very bad use of a wiki. As an attempt to organize encyclopedic information, it's good; as a single-author project, it completely subverted/perverted the entire spirit of wikiness. At least I had the decency to feel bad about it at the time.)

Wiki-ing the history of copyright proved to be a great way to organize the information for that chapter, but the wiki bit me in the ass because of its ability to expand ad infinitum. If I wanted to add a section on the history of French copyright, I could. If I wanted to make individual pages for each century of development in the Italian judicial system, I could do that. The encyclopedic air of a wiki makes it so tempting to want to stuff everything you can in there - especially since it's for the benefit of all humankind! Not so good when your chapter is supposed to be The History of Intellectual Property and the Internet in 20 Pages Or Less so you can get to theories of authorship, which is what you're actually on about. Eventually it became clear that if I ever wanted to move on to anything else in the thesis I was going to have to abandon the wiki, write the damned chapter straight up, and get on with my life. So I did.

Sometime during the weeks that the wiki sat unused, it blew up. I'm not entirely sure what happened - and neither is Mister SysAdmin - but I blame the host. I was able to recover the text files but not the structure, and the whole thing has been sitting on my hard drive since we moved this summer. It seems like a useful thing, though. There's other wikis on IP out there: the Intellectual Property Wiki, infoAnarchy Wiki, IP Law Wiki, and the relevant pages on Wikipedia. All of these briefly discuss IP History, but none of them really get into it. It seems like an IP History Wiki would be a needful thing, and there have to be other geeks like me out there who actually think IP History is fun. So sometime between now and the end of the year, I'm going to work on rebuilding the wiki that I had and reoffer it to the world in a properly unprotected state. And then we'll see what happens.

Note to Clancy: I'm using PMWiki, and it works fine. Except for the part where it doesn't currently exist, but that's not the wiki's fault.