@elduvelle fair question! So slack has the notorious problem of stuff falling off the scroll with time. You can find stuff by searching, true, but the overwhelming model is to send things back and forth to keep them current. That doesn't build a cumulative body of information tho. The two are both necessary, some ppl call the two "Gardens" (wikis) and "streams" (slack) - organized vs serial information

So a practical example: You have Project A that you're working on, say it even has its own channel. You are working on project A and encountering subproblems, and so people are sharing datasheets back and forth, as ppl solve problems they describe what's going on, ppl are posting plots of data and whatnot as they go. Someone new comes to join the project. How would they figure out what's going on? they would need to read back through the whole channel and piece together the information which is all out of order and embedded in conversation. Contrast that to a wiki where you would have a page for project A, and as you go you would make a section for datasheets, a section for plotted data, descriptions of problems encountered, and so on.

Think about onboarding a new member to a lab: how that usually goes is one or a few people will need to manually walk someone through all the parts of the lab, give them introductions to the equipment, protocols, etc. this could take weeks, and needs to be done new for every person joining the lab. A wiki gives a place to organize that information for the benefit of new and old members alike: how do we do this thing again? oh yeah right we have a page for that. Otherwise, as the people that know how to do something leave the lab, that institutional memory is lost and the lab needs to rediscover it.

Just a few examples. They're just different forms of information- "stream" form is really good for instantaneous sharing of information, coordination in realtime, but "garden" format creates a shared basis of understanding. Wikis are just one kind of gardenlike system, there is this whole world of "Personal Knowledge Graphs" like obsidian and notion and whatnot that are experimenting with the idea too.

The garden format becomes extremely critical for scaling organization beyond a few people to eg. the size of the lab. Otherwise it is difficult or impossible to understand what is going on in the lab unless you are tuned into and read every message in the slack. This applies to all kinds of organizations, not just labs, and I've had these same kinds of problems crop up in union and more below ground organizing too.

(side note: forums used to serve this role because they're an interesting mix of both, having more sticky threads within categories that can serve as guides, but what makes wikis critically different is the notion of every topic being able to have its own page and being able to [[WikiLink]] to them as you write without needing to eg. go look up a link. Discourse - forumlike software - is revisiting and updating some of these ideas.)

#Wikis #GardensAndStreams #KnowledgeOrganization #Forums