50 episodes listed below
Wiki software, knowledge work, and the people between.
Between the Brackets is a long-running interview show centered on MediaWiki, Wikimedia projects, and the many odd corners of wiki culture. Its conversations move from extension development and community events to encyclopedia politics, AI, research archives, and specialist knowledge projects.
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Between the Brackets is an interview show about MediaWiki, but its real subject is the ecosystem that grows around shared knowledge. It is grounded in software. It is just as interested in the people who decide what that software should do. Recent conversations move between developers, writers, researchers, volunteers, and users who have turned wikis into tools for work that would be difficult to house anywhere else. Wandji Collins talks about open source community in Cameroon, MediaWiki development, TechChantier, and the disruption of civil war. Noam Cohen brings Wikipedia into a wider argument about Silicon Valley, politics, crypto, moderation, and the power of online platforms. Paul Vodrazka explains how a non-programmer built the Layers extension with AI, turning MediaWiki into a place for image markup, slides, annotations, and visual explanation. Steve Shattuck describes AntWiki as a working knowledge base for ant species, while also talking through the tension between rich structure and easy editing. Moritz Schubotz connects MediaWiki extension development with mathematical information infrastructure. Digest episodes widen the frame. They collect earlier clips around recurring concerns: Wikimedia development pain, AI encyclopedias, bias disputes, Wikiversity as a possible learning management system, and the value of human-written summaries in an age of machine-generated text. The show can be dry in the best sense. It asks follow-up questions, notices edge cases, and lets specialized knowledge stay specialized. It also keeps returning to practical constraints: who has time to edit, who gets to attend events, what volunteers can sustain, and where institutional software makes simple work hard. The result is not a glossy technology show. It is a record of a mature open-source world thinking out loud about tools, governance, scholarship, and trust. Listeners come away with a clearer sense of how wikis survive because specific people keep solving specific problems.
Made for: Built for MediaWiki users, Wikimedia contributors, open-source developers, knowledge-management people, researchers, and curious technologists who like detailed conversations over polished sound bites.
What sets it apart: The show treats wiki infrastructure as lived practice, not just code. It connects extension design, volunteer culture, specialist databases, politics, AI, and editing friction through long, named conversations with people doing the work.
A podcast about the people and ideas behind the MediaWiki software. Interviews with developers and users of MediaWiki, both for Wikimedia sites (Wikipedia, Wikidata, etc.) and the many uses of MediaWiki in companies, organizations, government agencies, etc.
Ant encyclopedias and AI-built wiki slides: your oddly specific questions have company.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Wanji Collins connects MediaWiki work, open-source mentorship, and the uncertainty of life during Cameroon's civil war.
Wanji Collins brings MediaWiki's open-source community into view through the story of how he found his way from university in Buaya into the work, helped by longtime friend and mentor Derek Alangi.
Noam Cohen revisits Silicon Valley power, early Bitcoin, Wikipedia, and the politics behind The Know-It-Alls.
Noam Cohen brings a reporter's long view to Silicon Valley's political power, drawing on The Know-It-Alls, its new introduction, and his time as a Wikipedia editor.
A CNC shift leader discusses using AI to build the layers extension for MediaWiki.
The episode finds its clearest hook in Paul Vodraska's unlikely route into MediaWiki development: a non-programmer, working as a shift leader in the CNC department at Custom Castings, using AI to build the layers extension.
Five clips trace Wikimedia development frustrations, bias debates, and the pressure AI encyclopedias put on Wikipedia.
This BTB Digest uses five clips from earlier Between the Brackets conversations to map a cluster of Wikimedia concerns: development headaches, recurring bias arguments, and anxiety that Wikipedia may be moving too cautiously around AI.
A focused look at how MediaWiki editing choices can improve scientific knowledge work.
AntWiki frames the edit button as a small interface choice with real consequences for scientific work. In conversation with Jeroen Koren, the guest describes a MediaWiki-based setup where an error can be fixed at the point it is found, without moving between separate viewing and…
Science education between theory and classroom reality.
Yaron Koren interviews Wandji Collins, a MediaWiki developer from Cameroon, about his background and entry into open source through Derek Alangi.
Noam Cohen discusses his book on Silicon Valley's political evolution and his experience as a Wikipedia editor.
Yaron Koren interviews Paul Vodrazka, a non-programmer who created the visually interesting layers extension for MediaWiki using AI, discussing his background and the implications of AI in software development.
Yaron Koren presents clips from five previous episodes of Between the Brackets, focusing on complaints about Wikimedia sites being hard to develop for, Wikipedia's bias, and its obliviousness to AI challenges.
Steve Shattuck, a retired research assistant and systematist, discusses his work on AntWiki, a comprehensive online resource for ant species.
Liam Wyatt says Wikipedia’s minute-by-minute edit histories and talk pages could help future historians understand how society described itself.
Shlomit Lir, a University of Haifa researcher, says knowledge can be “manipulated, politicized, and maneuvered” in online spaces.
Brian Wolff says software can work exactly as designed and still fail when its goals miss the real-life need.
Moritz Schubotz discusses his role at FIZ Karlsruhe and his work on MediaWiki extensions for mathematical knowledge collection.
Joran Koren presents clips from five recent episodes, starting with a discussion with Steve Schneider about using wikis and AI for education and the potential of Wikiversity as a learning management system.
Yaron Koren interviews Tavi Vanenen, a Wikimedia Foundation site reliability engineer and Tech Contributor of the Year, about his background and work.
Jeroen Koren interviews Jeffrey Wong about his journey from creating MyWikis at age 11 to working at Microsoft and co-organizing the Canasta project.
Yaron Koren interviews Guillaume Coulombe about his company Procedurable, which uses open innovation solutions like MediaWiki for business process management and knowledge-based systems.