Argue Agree Idiom Argue

See also ArgueAgreeIdiom.

Here's the discussion I ran into on the KnowledgeManagement page which prompted me to suggest this idiom: I just realized it didn't belong on KnowledgeManagementArgue, it belongs here! In its brief stay in the wrong place, it picked up a response which (I hope DenhamGrey will agree) also belongs here.

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THIS was THE DISCUSSION ABOUT KnowledgeManagement. EdwardWelbourne ripped it off into a separate page, for reasons given below. In part I did this because it prompted me to think of the ArgueAgreeIdiom. -- Eddy

[~July 20, 1998; YeshaSivan] NOTE: I have taken the liberty to structure the additions to this page with names and dates so we can start looking at this in a more careful way.
Um, so how does this date-specific thready structure help? Seems far from WikiNature, not to mention really hard to read. I think, if you try to follow the style you can see on the rest of the Wiki, you'll find things much easier to manage.
[July 23, 1998; YeshaSivan] I'm simply trying to see how we can improve the WikiNature to make it even more helpful, especially to the area of building knowledge. When I think about it, the reason I want dates and names stem from my tacit believe which is now explicit that knowledge is not only facts and data it is about people and time.

But that's confusing because most of the folks here already follow the conventions in AddingNewPages and WikiConversation. Extra threadiness isn't WhyWikiWorks.

[25 July DaveHarris] Wiki is strong enough to support more than one kind of discourse. Us readers are strong enough not to get hopelessly confused. Personally, I applaud experimentation and innovation.

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So the wiki thing here is to cut and paste one or the other discussion into its own page. Left as an exercise.

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OK, so maybe the ArgueAgreeIdiom is a good idea and how about we move the orderly tidy time-like discussion Yesha was trying to encourage to this page, then play at free-for-all on KnowledgeManagement, because that's the Wiki way for the page with the True Name it has, and if we think we agree about something, put it on KnowledgeManagementAgree?. And let KM itself evolve in every which way, so it always looks like an essay that says something clear and useful, even if it isn't yet polished up and we don't quite all agree about it.

Then KnowledgeManagement can be an evolving page, this can be a growing page, and KnowledgeManagementAgree? can be comparatively static. Is this wise?

-- Eddy/1998/Aug/25 (EdwardWelbourne).

Well I guess there are more that two poles (i.e. agree or argue) around any concept, how about background, suggest, related to, value, names....??. I'm interested in the process of dividing a page when there appears to be a cluster of ideas with their own emergent identity. My question is What is the cost and what have we lost in this exercise? [August 25th, 1998: DenhamGrey]

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(I originally wrote this on WikiConversationArgue, but later decided this was a better place. The debate seems to have flowed into other pages, too.)

First, the trivial: I don't like the names. Some other pages have the suffix "Discussion", which I prefer to "Argue". For one thing, it's a noun - "Argument" would be better. For another, it's less confrontational.

Likewise I don't like the suffix "Agree". It has the added disadvantage that it implies people agree with the thesis of original page title. For example, if the consensus is that YouArentGonnaNeedIt is wrong, then the page title YouArentGonnaNeedItAgree? is misleading.

Anyway, I don't see what the Agree page gains us. Isn't it better to move the consensus opinion back into the root page? What's the difference between WikiConversation and WikiConversationAgree?

Finally, I don't think merely moving the discussion/argument to a new page actually solves the deeper problems of ThreadMode. It makes them a little more manageable because there's less going on, and it means they don't disturb the original page so much, but issues such as out-of-order comments remain to be resolved.

What we really need, in my view, is to accept that ThreadMode and DocumentMode are different, and evolve different conventions for them regardless of what page they are on. Eg adding dates, or using indentation, are proposals for the out-of-order problem. (See also WikiInterpolatedComments.) I personally believe that the answer lies in better technology. For example, Wiki could remember when I last visited this page and highlight the changes since then in red.

-- DaveHarris

Take that further and do a color diff - green for additions, red for deletions. -- PeterMerel

So here's part of my motivation (EdwardWelbourne again): I like the idiom of the pages with True Names being ones where everyone can just change what's said as radically as they see fit. But even I, with my 'bull in a chinashop' habits, feel shy of messing with something someone has written and signed: which leaves me wanting to change what they said but adding a comment on what they said instead. Which seems to defeat the aim. Having a standard naming convention can give folk a place to take the 'who said what' information and get it out of the way of 'what have we said', which is more important.

The reason I didn't use Discussion as the key was that we can really want pages about (the phenomenon of) discussion: likewise, Argument, Threads. So 'Argue', more or less because it is a verb, is (moderately) safe against name-space pollution.

So what do you think about the verb "Discuss"?

Argument needn't be confrontational: indeed, what the word deserves to mean is all that thesis/antithesis/synthesis stuff about presenting pros and cons and weighing up the options. We're arguing here and I don't see it as a confrontation. Using the word consciously with that meaning is also useful: it re-claims it from a world sliding towards the bad habit of using it as the name for some lamentable styles of oneupmanship contest behaviour which aren't useful or constructive.

Good point. Far too many words are now unusable because their connotation has slipped too far from their dictionary meaning. A queer situation, wouldn't you say?

As to the agree pages ... I can't say they're crucial, but they may be a good idiom, so I suggest them. The idea is roughly that the True Page is dynamic and changing fast, the Agree page contains the bare minimum about which the folk involved in the discussion don't disagree. But I'm not convinced it's useful either. Only that it might sometimes be so.

Pages with names like YouAintGonnaNeedIt give a good reason for exceptions to any naming convention - YouAreGonnaNeedIt is the place to disagree with it. So please don't imagine I think the convention has to be fixed or final. For that matter, if folk settle on Threads or Discussion rather than Argue, that'll be fine with me. What really matters is:

will it help to have a naming convention which makes some pages threaded while leaving pages with True Names to be dynamic and ... well, Wiki? -- Eddy/1998/Aug/26.

I think it'd be better to have sections of the single page for synthesis and discussion, and split subtopics off ad-hoc as is typically done. I tried breaking up a page into agreement and disagreement a while back and people disagreed with the partition. BreakingUpIsHardToDo?. Should I have put this into ArgueAgreeIdiomArgueAgree?? -- RonJeffries

One should be able to refer to another Wiki page in a natural manner: "... but don't do it that way because YouArentGonnaNeedIt" or "try the ObserverPattern".

Contrast with: "... but don't do it that way because YouArentGonnaNeedItAgree?" or "try the ObserverPatternAgree?".

The naming issue is really a question of what should be in the pages with "nice names". I think that depends on the nature of the page. If the ObserverPattern is documented is pattern form on Wiki, I would expect to find it in the page called ObserverPattern.

Of course, the nature of a page can change as it evolves and threads are woven and we argue back and forth and we reach consensus, sometimes leading to refactoring of pages. (Ok, maybe we don't ever reach consensus. ;-)

Summing up, I AgreeWithRonsThoughtsAboveArgue?. :-)

-- KielHodges