Welcome to the Sketch Wiki--everything there is to know and more about writing comedy sketches collaboratively. The Sketch Wiki is also a place where you can "just do it." Start a sketch, and see what happens when the world collaborates with you to make it even better.
This wiki is run by Laura Kranis and hosted by Ben Kovitz.
A wiki is a web site that lets you edit its pages. It's sort of like an on-line bulletin board. The name "wiki" comes from the Hawaiian word wikiwiki, which means "quick". Editing a wiki page is quick and easy, and requires no knowledge of HTML. To experiment, see Sand Box.
The first wiki ever was Ward Cunningham's Wiki. It was where many of the ideas of Extreme Programming were hashed out, as well as many software development patterns. Ward's Wiki still thrives as a meeting place for the software world to discuss culture, techniques, and ideas of all sorts.
Wikis, like Extreme Programming, involve a special style of collaboration: 'unilateral cooperation.' Each collaborator edits without asking permission from the other authors. There is little or no planning or discussion: you just edit the text itself. This results in an anonymously, collectively written work that is never "complete" but just keeps on growing and improving.
You are invited to modify any text on the wiki you like, to make it clearer, more interesting, more stimulating. It doesn't matter who the "original" author of the text is. You are invited to improve it however you like. That might be as simple as fixing a typo or as involved as adding text, splitting text into several pages, or rewriting it from scratch. The one proviso is to please never "improve" some text by having it no longer express an idea that you believe is mistaken. The wiki expresses all ideas that anyone found interesting or persuasive--rightly or wrongly. The improvements are to express the ideas so they are more stimulating to readers, and to add more ideas, never to take away.
One caveat: On the pages of The Sketch Wiki that are, themselves, comedy sketches being written, cutting sections may be as important as adding or changing. All kinds of changes are welcome if you truly feel it will make the piece even better. Please notice if a change you are about to make turns the sketch into something radically different than it was. Maybe that's fine. Or maybe that means it would be better to start a new sketch on a new page for your new direction. We can play with more than one version coming from the same original idea. Or we can see one version through many lives. It's up to all of us!
Welcome! Have fun!
You can start new pages below:
The Oregonian's Article on the 2004 Best Of The Best Festival in Portland