User:AaronPeterson/How i got into wikis

I came across the Faq-O-Matic website when I first moved to WSU. I was so impressed with the idea, that I bought the domain names for the author, and tried a few times to get him to accept them, he might have mentioned wiki's at this time, but I don't remember it.

I started taking a Russian class at Washington State University, and, besides being very distracted by a girl, started thinking about how language is like so many other things... and spent so much time thinking about this, that I sort of didn't worry about my classes as much as I should have. I started writing my own written language, It consists of many strokes that look like U and C, (reminds me of Korean) that have meanings like, union, subset, superset (contains is similar), length, time, mass, energy, fluid, gas, solid, (division is similar to child of) and, direct object, and subject. These have slight pictographic elements, and I became interested in chineese.

Chineese is a beatifull language. I took about 1.5 semesters of it, with a C, and an F ... (bahh)

My dad took me to a Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) conference, which was about pattern languages... (basically wikis) I was really bothered by this, because it looked like a bunch of cross referanced encyclopedia articles! Well, I got right up, and boldly (stupidly) asked the presenter about the grammer of this language.. and I asked it in a poor manner that didn't get any answers, but I was still interested in this.

I ate lunch with one of the people from Evergreen State College (washington state hippy college), and told him about my interest, and he told me about wikis.

There was a workshop on the last two days of this conference, where people who wanted to work on the pattern language together could. This was managed by Open Space. Basically, we were instructed to write down what we wanted to talk about, and then go arround the circle, to announce what we wanted to talk about, combine duplicates, and schedual times to operate sub groups.

I wanted to talk about atomic patterns.. (basically the list given above), and very few people came to my work spot..

I presented a really neat list of atomic patterns, and an outline.

Also of note, one man talked to me, and he seemed excited about what i was talking about. I recognized this as object orientation, and he gave me a bunch of "class function implementation??" cards... but this was on the second day, and he was appearing to have a heart attack, and told somebody to give the cards to me. This sent a surge of addrenaline into me, I believed that I was onto something, if a guy who was having a heart attack really wanted me to have something. (it turns out to have been very minor, or not a heart attack) My wiki's started with "name purpose plan", and my homepage ( http://escargot.icehouse.net ) has Name:Purpose:plan on every page... (ALPine, what I care about, promote and link).

Anyway, The Open Space facilitator was also took note of my interest in Open Space, and gave me a book about it!.. I really felt like this would be my purpose in life.

Sadly, the book was in a bag, that was stollen, or mistakenly taken... and I never got to read it!

I then started editing wikis, here is a list!