When you talk about wiki, everybody thinks mainly of wikipedia, wikimedia, wikibooks, wikinews and the other projects. They all focus on the article-part itself, and forget the power of the structure a wiki offers. For giving a wiki a more semantic touch, as is proposed for the web 3.0, you don't necessarily need to implement new software features. You can do it with what you have already. But a change in the way of thinking about wikis is needed to do that. I want to outline some ideas for new ideas of realizing a wiki, i think they are somewhat innovative, and would be quite useful.


The food chain
The chain is not so much a chain, but more of a web. The key for it aren't the animals and plants and other organisms themselves, but the combination of who eats what and which parts. Categories could explain groups with same eating habits like carnivores, herbivores, etc. In my opinion it would be nice to visualize small parts of the web. It would be helpful for understanding and creating ecosystems.

Product Parts
There are hundreds of thousands of companies creating products. All of them use products of other companies as product parts, materials, assembly machinery, etc. It would be really interesting to see, how this web is spun, how complex a product is, and what would happen if one element in the web would break down. It would help us to understand the meaning of natural ressources, the importancy of recycling trash, and open positions for further developments.

Water systems
Every river has a spring and ends in the ocean. No wait, they don't. Water is a self-organizing web of streams, from the smallest trickle to the widest stream. They are all in a hierarchy, which sometimes can change, and sometimes is forcefully changed by humans building canals.

Company shares
Everybody knows about it, stock market analysts are the gurus of it, but noone has a full picture. Many companies have shares of other companies, they have daughter companies and conglomerates etc. A wiki for companies could give that information to everybody, and show the problems of the system itself and the impacts of any disturbances in the market.

Can you think of other ideas? Write a comment on it!

pictures by Domenico Nardone and Tobin Fricke