Ward like many of us in the federation, were steeped in the idea of hypertext, before there was a world wide web. Much of this thinking is capture in More About reading.
Ward Cunningham writes: > But on Wiki, unlike a book, every reader is an author. The important point then is that the reader see not just the current best point, but the points of authors willing to write about a subject. > There is only so much material sufficiently related to the subject of a page to be included on the same page. But the page can hold or link to whatever the reader needs in order to quickly understand as many points as they feel like reading. > The page gravitates toward consensus, but that does not exclude it from diversity. The more popular views of the authors will naturally tend to be the more accessible views, as more authors are willing to work to make them accessible.
The wiki way, involves more than a shift towards integrating the author. Wiki is more than a pencil. The aspect of wiki which is harder to capture with an engineering vocabulary are the concepts that speak to the social design.