Change Management Applied To Wiki

Wiki is practical, open, bottom-up, collaboration on a complex and under-specified issue, an InformalHistoryOfProgrammingIdeas. Bold and continuous ReFactoring is required. Unfortunately, Wiki currently supports only OneView? of its world. Could this be otherwise? A MultipleViewWiki?

Can is really be that way? Look at the RefactorMercilessly item. Is it being enough refactored? To me, it contains a lot of duplication, and badly lacks reorganization. What prevents this refactoring from happening?

There are no tests that we could run in order to check that we don't break anything (looks like pure ExtremeProgramming doesn't apply well here)
We cannot quite distinguish between lack of knowledge and disagreement. Conflicts are not easily detected, and they cannot be solved unilaterally: you must allow local divergence to achieve global convergence in the long run (i.e. to write commonly acceptable history)
By making dramatic changes, we might drop our FriendlyPeerContributors, and thus break our toy. Merciless means bold, not brutal: how to decouple? We want to ensure that all contributors share a feeling of security, of control. This one is best grounded in continuity (mathematical sense: an arbitrarily small change in the result can be traced down to a change in the cause)

I believe SoftwareConfigurationManagement per se is SoftwareChangeManagement, or that SoftwareChangeManagement is an aspect of SCM. Something which is needed on top of SCM though, is a way to manage intentions, and to express them as the scope for multiple changes. -- MarcGirod

c2 already has a quick-and-dirty archive, up at http://c2.com/wiki/history/. It's memory is limited, since it's only designed to help people undo vandalism, not for complete versioning all the way back to the beginning of time. And there are plenty of pages here that have been successfully refactored. They're just harder to see.

EditHints are a tool for merciless refactoring, reconciling readability with politeness, bold but not brutal. HumanBeings don't like to be handled as current state of art software to be operated on. -- FridemarPache (a FriendlyPeerContributor)

They can be seen as a temporary departure from the main state of the edition: one kind of use of branches in SCM terms, the kind intended to be merged back to an upper branch.

Wouldn't it be a good idea to incorporate SCM into Wiki to prevent damage to the Wiki repositories?

If we would allow anyone to create newer versions of a page, but not grant anyone permission to delete previous versions, we could prevent hackers from taking down the Wiki repository. On top of that, having a version history would be great for people investigating the origins and developments of ideas and constructs in computer science.

To allow the community to self-regulate we could use a voting mechanism to allow the community to select the current branch (to speak in CVS terms) of the discussing, cutting of discussion threads that are seen as unproductive. -- JoostSchalken

We want to ensure that all contributors share a feeling of security, of control.

What do you mean "we", Kemo Sabe? I want to ensure all contributors share a feeling of trust, but not necessarily security or control. Security and control are far too much to ask for in a place like this. If you want security and control, go somewhere where your words can't be edited by strangers. -- francis

My investment would not be secured in a private media, where I would be a provider and others consumers. The fact my words couldn't be challenged and criticized by others would jeopardize their value. --MarcGirod

Yes, your words are often of more value when they're shared. They're also less your words. -- francis

Yes, your words are often of more value when they have a recognized value and are accepted by and integrated into others IdeaSpaces. That does not remove the fact that they were your words, it just means that your words have expanded from your IdeaSpace into another or several others IdeaSpaces. When this occurs many times for many people, your words are on the way to becoming "CommonKnowledge". It will be so because they have been validated and accepted. -- DonaldNoyes

CategoryWiki, CategoryChange