This reminds me of the project ran by scholar Avery Morrow, "Everything Shii Knows."[0] He was an early Wikipedia administrator and one of the founders of 4chan. It was really interesting.
Great work OP, personal wikis are very cool! I wish there were more of them :(
It reminds me of Shii's wiki, too. Shii's wiki is not only a personal knowledge base, but also a piece of important documentation of Internet cultural history.
Unlike the pre-2000 Usenet era, Internet culture today (e.g. those on 4chan) is no longer systematic documented, and for better or worse, it has a significant influence to the "cyberspace" as a whole. But when people started to realize the existence of something, it's already too late to understand it, original records have been all lost... And people started shouting, "what the hell is going on?"
Written documentation like Shii's wiki is the rare treasure of a time capsule, a snapshot of the time. At Shii's wiki, 2006 never ends.
I'm particularly interested in the history of online culture of obscure political movements (including those crazy conspicary theorists and nationalists). It'n not that I'm morally approving their actions, but to me, they seem to be a new type of social organization in the information age. From Shii's wiki, written by a intelligent person who's observing and thinking about these topics, you can see many indications in 2006 about the status of things and how it's connected to the present day.
This 2006 article describes the upcoming demise of Internet utopianism. The massive commercialization was transforming the Internet to just another TV, telephone, or a shopping mall. It also mentioned how giving everyone access to information can have the side-effect of disintegrating information authority and good writing, and causes the polarization of extremes in politics.
> Will we ever have another Thomas Paine standing in the street, telling us common sense that changes our lives? Those are rhetorical questions. The answer is no. There will be no more shots heard round the world, no more revelations shocking the whole nation at once. The Web is a difficult freight train to turn around, and it will likely destroy those lines of communication.
These topics/issues are NOT identified and explored by the Internet personalities/analysis/mass media until recently.
Before Donald Trump gets popular in 2016 on the Internet, this trend can be traced back to (1) free trade and globalization, (2) September 11th, (3) hatred of neoconservatism online, which caused (4) many to support Pon Paul, (5) whose supporters were later disillusioned. Then the (6) Great Recession and (7) Obama occurred. It was a very complicated chain of events, which were all partially documented in Shii's wiki.
The bottom-line is, I think Shii must have gained some deep insights about everything by reading through the endless shitposts on 4chan. I wonder if Donald Trump never ran for the president, it may take another 10 years for the common people to realize these issues.
If you are involved in some online community, please consider to create your personal knowledge base. 20 years later, it may become the only historical records of something.
I think you've missed my point. I'm not saying that Shii was a wizard, oracle or prophet, and we should find the next one to predict the future for us. When looking back, things are often pretty straightforward and clear, hindsight is always 20/20.
Instead, what I'm saying is that, he preserved an important segment of the history for us by creating his personal knowledge base, especially that, it was written by someone who was an Internet-native, worked extensively on Wikipedia at its early time, and credited as one influential figure who shaped early 4chan. So we can use the material from his knowledge base to gain some insights about some parts of the undocumented history.
And I think it's another advantage of an knowledge base - it can provide a good record of history from a personal perspective, more comprehensive than a blog or diary.
Great work OP, personal wikis are very cool! I wish there were more of them :(
[0] http://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Everything_Shii_Knows...