Both Ward Cunningham’s C2 wiki (the first and oldest wiki) and Meatball Wiki have articles on the concept of the "WikiNow", in which the page databases of wikis are not only always up and available, but are also available to edit at any time by anyone, no matter how old a page may be.

This means that a wiki article grows from the input of anyone at any time, but hardly shows its age to the reader unless a clear disparity is shown between the present and the last time that the article was revised by someone. But wiki articles are "living documents" that don’t have a point of "thread death" since there isn’t a date-based "progression" from first post to last post (or most recent thread to earliest thread); in fact, you usually have to look at the "History" page linked by the main article to see explicit references to the time it took for users to edit the main article.

So if Google Wave, which was just released, is meant to be an infusion of e-mail, instant messaging and social networking with the wiki model (where the "conversation", if it can be called such, allows for the editing of any user’s post by other users in real-time), then should it be infused with the sense of the WikiNow, where the wave can be edited at any time if the relevant users have an interest in doing so, and there isn’t a up-front accompaniment of timestamps with the posts (or "blips") to the wave?

I would think that making Google Wave more compatible with the sense of the WikiNow, with a sense of "I’ll take care of that mistake, or someone else will take care of it while I’m out of ideas at the moment", might help sell it to the masses of users who want to see a new method of web-based communication, at least so that waves can offer longer, more complete or coherent ideas than what one beginning-to-end conversation can accomplish in a day.