Creating An Encyclopedia Metaphor

Attempts at making a HouseConstructionMetaphor metaphor proved unclear. KrisJohnson, however, suggested:

: Maybe creating an encyclopedia - each article is written independently, each article is reviewed while it is being written, and you rewrite the articles or re-organize the information as you go along to make the encyclopedia better.

Let's explore this within the context of MetaphorsForNontechnicalAudience.

An encyclopedia may be a little too grandiose, in that its ultimate goal would be too contain as much information as possible, even information in which no one is interested. Some other kind of book, with a more focused purpose, might serve as a better metaphor for XP when you talk about how topics for the book (UserStories) are created and selected (PlanningGame).

But I think the metaphor does need to be some sort of reference material, so that "correctness" (UnitTests) can be judged and so that is is reasonable to have a large number of people working on it, working in pairs. A novel or a philosophical or historical book would probably be best written by a single author, and measuring its value would be very subjective.

It would also be good if the book is something where authors would be getting direct feedback from users and where there are iterative releases. I can't think of such a thing. There are online books/web sites that undergo a lot of revision, but that may be going too far away from the goal of having a non-technical metaphor.

-- KrisJohnson

More grandiose than what we're considering, yes, because the base notion of the encylcopedia is to be comprehensive ... a program to do everything? That would be hubris. But this metaphor's strength doesn't depend on comprehensiveness; this metaphor's validity arises out of the notion of self-complete parts working together. To tack slightly: like pages in a wiki, each article in a collection has a whole set of shared characteristics (elements like "see also" and "category", and format). Writing to MILSPEC each member of my team would produce cookie-cutter chunks. --BenTremblay

Some material moved to EncyclopediaSystematica?, where it is completely lost in the drivel.

CategoryMetaphor