A real-life Wiki Garden?

#1

Hello there,

Gardening is commonly used metaphorically in the world of Wiki, but what would a real-life wiki garden look like? What purposes could it serve?

I’m inspired by The Garden of Cosmic Speculation a landscape rather than a garden designed by architecture theorist Charles Jenks and his wife Maggie.

I have a tiny garden. It’s linked to a small room which I’m developing as a home for a modestly-sized community focused organisation. Rather than linking landscape to cosmos to aid cosmic speculation, I’d like to develop a tiddly garden to aid contemplation around cooperation and knowledge sharing. I’d somehow like to bring ideas from the Tiddlywiki community to the project.

This is a reboot of an old idea. I posted to the Google group a few years ago. Now is a good time to revisit it because I have a room connected to the garden.

Any thoughts are most welcome

Alex HOUGH

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#2

Socio-historically the “Garden” in UK culture is a harmonious relationship between the “wild” and the “cultivated”. It is also, linguistically, a metaphorical engine that explores tropes concerning “domestication”, “nature” and the “organic”. If you are interested in these aspects try Man & The Natural World by Keith Thomas. There are also interesting books concerning the florescence of the “allotment” in UK history.

The “garden’s” metaphoric power is highly marked in UK & Japan. Different philosophies, though some overlap.

(P.S: *will you resurrect the Sheep Wiki for gardening? * I thought, visually, that stuff was brilliant!)

#3

Hey @AlexHough : Your question is one i’ve also done some thinking about -and a bit of development, in the form of this TW instance: https://slofood.github.io/ … Still very much in alpha-dev stage, but nevertheless providing one sort of answer to this question.

The context is: there’s a thriving Organic Market Garden on my farm, yielding bumper crops of all sort of vegetables for which there is not (yet!) sufficient market demand… So the idea is to create a site that profiles each of these plants, and positions it in the context of a SLO (Seasonal/ Local/ Organic) food diet.

There are some technical challenges associated with this model, in that each of these profile pages needs to feature some image(s -at least one, but better several), links to relevant info (how the plant is grown, recipes for what you can do with it), plus all these pages must tie-in to collection pages (by Seasonality, Plant Type, Plant Family)… And then all must be presented in a way that is both highly functional AND beautiful, faithful to those intrinsic qualities of the plants themselves.

To address these issues, this TW instance relies heavily on two plugins in particular:

  1. The TiddlyGoo plugin, which enables hosting of all this structured data in Google Sheets, and easy import into the TW instance every time the sheet gets updated.

  2. The Shiraz plugin. which provides a rich set of affordances for styling the presentation of content.

I’ve got a long way to go yet with understanding the tech & using it to best advantage, especially on the “stylish content presentation” side of things… But really the biggest tech challenge that i don’t yet have any good idea about is: how to enable low-friction collaboration over content.

Without knowing more about your own app design goals Alex, it sounds to me like you too are aiming to build something that should serve to engage community -yes? If so, i’d like to know whatever thoughts you might have about how this might best be accomplished.

In any case Alex: It is good to know there is at least one other member of this community that shares this most down-to-earth view of what the term “Wiki Garden” might come to mean. Viva!

/walt

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#4

Yes, please: do tell more!

As it happens, i am also running sheep on my farm -and grazing them through plots that have already given up their yield, to fertilize and graze on the crop residue.

Example: inspired by this Wooly Weeders outfit in Napa Valley, we’ve just finished running sheep through the vineyard, where they did an amazing job of pruning vines, w/ very little of the damage we’d feared might happen. Beautiful synergy to be had here!

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#5

I got some idea from Roam Research

See: Roam Research – A note taking tool for networked thought.

image
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and also: Implementing Zettelkasten in Roam: A practical guide - RoamBrain.com

#6

Interesting… Though none of the content seems related to any physical (i.e. plants-in-soil) sort of garden, i like how the author views his wiki as a living ecology. Am particularly inspired by the the way 2 different types of plant imagery -i.e. evergreen trees and annual plants- are incorporated; am finding this distinction relevant in my own wiki-garden, where i sometimes struggle with distinguishing between:

  1. Annual crops (e.g. journal entries) that serve their purpose, then are terminated (i.e. archived) or subsumed into

  2. Perennial plants (e.g. tiddlers w/ shared permanent URLs) that are to be maintained in perpetuity.

Of course both types of plantations require a modicum of care (i.e. weeding!), but perennial plantations, with a healthy mix of plants at all levels (from tiny shrubs of granular content to towering trees with many branches) should eventually become a self-sustaining ecosystem, given sufficient connections both internally and to the larger ecosystem in which they are embedded.

Thanks for sharing this illustrative metaphor, @Mohammad !

/walt

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#7

It is interesting! FYI, I’m familiar with Napa, having lived for whiles in Sebastopol (Near Santa Rosa in neighboring Sonoma County).

Regarding the OP, the “vini-culture” of CA is interesting. It is more “horticulture” than “my yard garden” maybe, but certainly very interesting on issues of human(e), eco-okay management of farms.

Just a side note
TT

#8

The ONE thing lacking in it is that …

Screenshot 2021-09-15 130122
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… a plant is NOT an idea.
FYI I grow cabbages for the pot, not to support coding.
End.

These metaphors used widely on the net re “gardens” (and therefore relevant to @AlexHough’s OP) tend to destroy symbolically what gardening actually involves. Which is patient horticulture.

TT :slight_smile:

#9

I am not sure I get this gardening thing, a metaphor?. Are you using it like memory specialists place things in rooms as a way to organise? I have not read about “digital gardening”, I expect because I have my own ways, but I am open to new methods.

Perhaps related to this is a discovery that people have very good “trail memory”. If your are bushwalker and take the same path you may have experienced this yourself, or perhaps you regularly take a long drive. Generally we recall in a generalised form but as you take the trail you discover detailed memories arriving “just in time”, for you to remember a slippery bit, even specific bends or rocks. With carful observation you will discover you learn and recall vast amounts of details on a walk. We often see ahead 5-10 steps and sometimes tend not to even look at out feet, but the feet go where this “steps ahead” memory tells us.

I expect learning the details of permaculture would have its own values but also allowing you to organise into zones the things you know and experience.

To me its all about understanding ourselves as evolved beings and how some skills are inbuilt and others are not. Placing those that are not, into an environment we already grasp can anchor ideas. Look how quickly the first graphical interfaces, pointers, then touch devices took over, the way we use computers, because they leverage our evolved skills. Even surpassing language in many cases.

Perhaps coincidentally I spent a few hours recently in a flight of fancy thinking how I could tap into “trail memory” by using a generated “map” to navigate around tiddlywiki, and considering how to use use maps on top of tiddlywiki’s ability to represent almost any organisational structure you can dream up from list, queues to networks, hierarchies and database models.

As a Knowledge and Information management professional, I am at home with a wide range of organisational methods which I have dreamed of illustrating to novices so they could use them too. Logic, pseudo code, actual code, database normalisation and more may be easier to share.

This ideas of trails, with branches, bridges, tunnels, intersections merging lanes etc… may be able to achieve this.

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#10

Right on, @TW_Tones : Leveraging the power of archetypal images that we all share at a deep level -i.e. the level of human genome, not Silicon Valley techscape- is just good strategy, if we can map the former to the latter in a useful way (bearing in mind the old saw that “All maps are wrong; some are useful.”).

If we can ditch the ugly office metaphors of desktops and file folders and trash bins for archetypes derived from nature, that would at least be refreshing at a superficial level -and might even turn out to be a form of “biomimicry” that will lead us to rediscover some forgotten wisdom. For example: nature knows nothing of trash-bins; instead, the outputs of any natural system get “upcycled” as inputs to another system, and so the flow of natural evolution attains to ever-higher levels of complexity, in apparent defiance of the 2nd law of thermodynamics (not really, since Earth is not an energetically closed system -but it’ll do for a metaphor :slight_smile:
Q: Does this not also make sense in a world of ever-expanding digital data? Chewy food for thought!

So @TiddlyTweeter : much as i am on your side w/r/t growing for the pot, am not sure i agree that the Wiki Garden metaphor does any harm to popular understanding of what actual gardening is all about. Witness the phenomenon of Farmville (RIP :skull: ) never confused anybody with half a clue about farming, and yet it actually prompted people who never gave a 5hit about farming to ask me some halfway clueful questions about what we’re actually cultivating on this here farm… So what’s the harm?

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#11

I am not evolved. Just saying.

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#12

@ludwa6 my thoughts exactly.
Nature and Evolution is a hot bed of “algoritiums” to tap into, especially our own “pre-history” and nature we tend to loose track of in our intellectual worlds.

The tendency towards diversity, and life’s local increases in order are interesting subjects. To me I hope to continue building order through the evolution of the way I organise knowledge and information (in TiddlyWiki)

Don’t get me wrong, I too love the depth in many intellectual pursuit’s as well.

Me too @TiddlyTweeter

#13

Ha. Your example is great. And kinda supports my point actually. My complaint was not about would-be farmers, merely that use of the “garden” thing in metaphors for code design is a growth hormone too far :slight_smile:

TT

#14

Vero. FYI, I did get very interested in the Sonic Hedgehog genie thing that led to your ultimate metamorphosis.

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#15

Yes! the reverse is correct! The ideas are like seeds! You can grow them!

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#16

Thank you! I didn’t think about that.

I could develop the visual style by cloning SheepyWiki’s visual style. I think I’d just discovered CSS animations at the time

Your encouragement at the time was most appreciated btw

Alex

#17

In a TiddlyWiki Garden plants can be cloned from an original. Ideas may be seeds, but we can also clone them, put them in new environments.

It would be a analogous to NewHere method of creating new tiddlers, changing the type of plant by editing might not be possible.

But I suppose if I took a cutting (clone) then grow the plant and then grafted a new branch on later I would be editing the plant, or maybe refactoring them.

SheepyWiki was inspired by Dolly the sheep, the first cloned sheep.

Alex

#18

I’m thinking back to Wards Wiki, the first wiki.

There, Ward Cunningham developed the idea that software could be developed using Pattern Language, an idea from building and the built environment.

Like a town, a building, parks and gardens, we can see software as something that needs continuous repair and care.

The same ethos was applied to his wiki, which developed a method of software development following Pattern Languages.

A literal real life wiki garden could take inspiration from wiki culture, inheriting ides from Christopher Alexander et al. in the pattern language book.

Alex

#19

Would you believe when I was a young man (70s) I saw some of the first clones produced. I met a scientist over my CB Radio and went with my father to “eye ball” him and he showed us his hundred’s of identical “pitcher plants”, they then used these as controls in plant experiments. I never had trouble with the concept of cloning my tiddlers.

Christopher Alexander et al. in the pattern language book.

I know of Christopher Alexander, I have that book, “The Pattern Language” and read some of the larger tomes in our local university. I took an interest during my “sustainability years” where I taught myself a lot about sustainability, environmental, social and the built environment, which is what drew me to “The pattern Language”. Of course I was surprised to discover it’s relationship to my carrier in Information Technology. I believe it was the source of many developments in coding in the earlier days especially.

Personally my interest is growing in the direction of abstraction and instantiation. Which may be part of a superset which includes digital gardens, patterns and biomimicry etc…

#20

Hi @ludwa6 : first of all thanks for your interest and sharing your wiki. It shows the signs of a highly organised approach. The project itself is something I think a lot of people will be interested in.

My garden is located in an area (Alsager, Cheshire, England) which previously grew a lot of fruit and veg in market gardens. It seems now that locally grown and sold produce are quite scarce. A project like yours would go down really well.

We have a small independent shop locally which sells organic produce – not much of it is grown nearby. The local economy (and the rest of the UK economy) currently struggles to support enterprises like your SLOfood project.

The farm shops based locally specilaise in meat and ice cream, but not fruit and vegetables. I’ve had a few conversations with people who say would like to buy local produce.

Yes! I am “aiming to build something that should serve to engage community” (I couldn’t have put it better)

(Wouldn’t it be wonderful if this interaction around the idea of wiki gardening on the TiddlyWiki Forum sparked a real life community market garden project!)

I looked into pickle making a few years ago. I became fascinated my Japanese fermentation and then the fermentation revival movement of which Sandor Katz has become a leading light. Katz has written a book on fermentation as metaphor [1], and in the exhibition Old Kitchen, what I’m currently calling the room opening onto the WikiGarden (or TiddlyWikiGarden … I’m not sure at the moment) there are the start of a plan for Pickle Club.

Pickle Club would be a monthly community meeting where people learn and swap their preserves. The Club could have events. One event that could work would be sausage, beer and sauerkraut, another BBQ and kimchi.

This monthly meeting could be one of many. The other monthly meeting on the drawing board is a reboot of The Lunar Society, a group of folk who met on full moons.

A way to sell “surplus” goods could be through homegrown events. I imaginge the lunar society will be nurishing themselves with Cheshire Cheese and some kind of pickle and ale.

What I am getting at here is that building a community around the product

In Cheshire, arguably the area in which the industrial revolution first took hold, Elizabeth Raffald published the first recipe for Piccalilli, a pickle which is now very much associated with the UK’s collection of traditional food, but the concept came from India. And its a simple concept: Pickle your crop so that it can be stored, give it a brand name , sell it keeping connection to the local area.

In the USA there are some social enterprises built around pickling, and for some years it has felt that fermented good were going to break through into the mainstream in a similar way to craft beer.

In Japan producers specialise in different pickles. Begin Japanology [2] is a good place to start. In China Li Zi Qi has turned the running of a market garden in the Szechuan mountains into an art form. Her YouTube channel shows traditional Chinese agriculture and foraging, she’s become a huge success. Check out her Secret Life of Radish to she how traditional skills and small scale agriculture can be combined in a highly stylised aspirational aesthetic.

[1] Fermentation as Metaphor by Sandor Ellix Katz | Chelsea Green Publishing
[2] BEGIN Japanology - Tsukemono Pickles - YouTube