Disregard The Adjunct

TheAdjunct is an intentional sinkhole for content its creators want to delete, but don't have the patience to EditWar away. Like the other SisterSites, it's not adequately integrated with WikiWiki to maintain wiki's ExtremeIntertwingling. So moving pages to the adjunct destroys content coherence and community coherence. Shut it down and move the content back please.

Come on, Pete, it's a bit late for that. Why the BlackHat?

My hat's not black; it's moth-eaten and frayed, doesn't keep the sun off or rain out, and chafes my ears. But I still believe in WikiNature, TolerateOffTopic, and MakeSignalNotNoise. As described on WikiContentGenerationProcess I don't have any faith in the present approach for these purposes. I don't believe in sister sites, stewards, edit codes, or any of the rest of it.

But that's progress for you.

I usually wave hands about going and doing something even less practical than wiki. Having no spare time to invest in impracticalities at present I thought, hey, let's at least dissent and let 'em scurry on with just a tinge of "maybe this isn't exactly the right thing to do ..." or even better "first, do no harm".

And anyway, in the WikiNow, how can anything be late? Or is WikiNow as old fashioned as WikiNature? Durn fool kids ... durn fool rain ... <hikes up threadbare collar and shambles off with trolley full of garbage bags>

I don't believe in SisterSites ...

Presumably you mean anymore. I'm truly sorry you feel that way. Or in refactoring WikiDom either, 'cause that's all that's happening here. Maybe we'll get to a UnifiedRecentChanges too. Would that make SisterSites InterTwingled enough for you?

UnifiedRecentChanges would make a considerable difference ... presuming its url is http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RecentChanges.

What the heck difference does the the url make, as long as its contents link to the various wikis represented?

Audience inertia. What the heck difference does a timeslot make? May as well show StarTrek at 3am.

Better try AggregationOnTheClient.

Bollocks. You're suggesting wikizens have the same inclination to change an entry on their bookmarks as your average TelevisionAddict? has to get off the couch to change the channel. I don't buy it. Maybe it's not news to you, but it is to me, UnifiedRecentChanges is implemented on CommunityWiki. See http://www.emacswiki.org/cw/RecentNearChanges

UnifiedRecentChanges is one bad idea. If others have implemented it doesn't mean that Ward should follow it. And if you don't like AggregationOnTheClient, you can consider running a third party IndependentAggregator?. -- CostinCozianu

No, but I wasn't suggesting that he should, neither does it follow that because Ward doesn't implement it (for his own reasons, the most obvious being effort involved) that it's a bad idea. Why exactly is it a bad idea? (Remove and answer on UnifiedRecentChanges is probably a good idea.)

I meant to say it's bad idea if it's done on the server-side (as originally intended). AggregationOnTheClient makes it unnecessary while UnifiedRecentChanges on the server runs contrary to the well known principle of SeparationOfConcerns and will run into problems one can do without. -- Costin

Different people have different groups of concerns, which is why we have different wikis, but they also can overlap, which is why we have SisterSites. UnifiedRecentChanges is just another tool to make it easy for users to deal with SisterSites. AggregationOnTheClient requires a great deal more technical knowledge and effort than just being able to bookmark a single page. A third party aggregator would be fine, no one is suggesting that a UnifiedRecentChanges needs to replace any wiki's own individual RecentChanges.

I assume you reserve your right to have different views at different times and in different moods, but nonetheless, clearly you're aware of contents of page WikiReductionists, and that page's contents serve as a counter-argument to your point on this page, no?

Nope. Nor am I arguing. I'm ranting. It's only a little rant. It's not really defensible. It's an expression of distaste - how the hell can you defend that?

Feh. Double feh. The little link pictures at the bottom of the page are going both ways now, so TheAdjunct is just as inter-twingled as anything else here. RegardTheAdjunct?! -- EricHodges

What's the benefit of the little link pictures?

They automatically link to pages from multiple wikis.

Categories do that fine. And they're manageable, reliable, and consistent. The little pictures are haphazard, brittle, and volatile.

What do we get from splitting up the content?

Not much. Like get rid of the noise polution and people spoiling for an argument.

What was wrong with categories in the first place?

Nothing. Categories are still here.

Great. How well do they work InterWiki between c2 and TheAdjunct?

There's coherence in letting the OffTopic cruft build up and obscure the OnTopic? That must be a different definition of "coherence" than I know. I say TheAdjunct has performed admirably at giving a place for content that people don't want to discard, but really doesn't belong here. This has enabled a long overdue SpringCleaning?. I say DeleteThisPageSoon. (seconded)

You know, if I could figure out what the criterion for deleting or moving content is, apart from, "I don't agree with this", I might have some sympathy for all this cleaning you lot do. Delete this page, refactor that, keep the other, no rhyme or reason, just pile on and let's go gang. What is the GrandWikiVision? or GrandWikiMission? you're trying to achieve? Do you think that just by ThreadMessing or deleting anything that doesn't contribute to your own present inspiration you're actually accomplishing something here?

It's not a matter of disagreeing. (Actually, I agree with some of what I've moved there. Most of the rest I've just considered irrelevant.) It's a matter of being OffTopic, and not even a recent OffTopic discussion. If you really think this content is garbage, why not delete it? The point is that it has its defenders who don't think it's garbage. It's still OffTopic, however, and doesn't belong here in perpetuity. (Or, is the problem determining what is related to programming and what is not?)

Am I mistaken or have you just agreed with the rant that started this page?

You're mistaken. TheAdjunct gives a third choice between deletion and filling C2 up with OffTopic stuff. I think the idle chat should be deleted there, too. And I think this page should be deleted when cooked.

Really, looking at TheAdjunct now it's a bunch of twaddle that doesn't even meet the standards of WhyClublet. I think that instead of calling it TheAdjunct you should call it TheNavel?.

99% of that "twaddle" was previously on this site. So why weren't you calling this site "The Navel"?

Flowers grow in fertilizer. If you haul the fertilizer away, you can just call it shit.

Presumably flowers can grow in it wherever you haul it to too. Whether people show up to throw seeds in is a different matter. But maybe we're getting close to pushing the fertilizer analogy.

Who wants to read a Wiki consisting only of disjoint prose arbitrarily and unilaterally rejected by DeleteJunkies? from another Wiki?

More to the point: Who is reading/editing TheAdjunct, especially when you filter out posts that consist of moving content from here. This isn't a rhetorical question - is TheAdjunct regularly visited/edited, or is it indeed a dumping ground?

Too early to tell. Give it time to grow first. In the meantime you can still help the survey WhoIsActiveOnWiki.

There are many topics that people claim are off-topic for C2 -- such as baseball, chocolate-chip recipies, politics, water quality, etc. -- that are nevertheless interesting and valid topics of discussion. Or at least some people seem to think so. One hopes that people interested in some topic will gravitate towards wiki where that topic is on-topic. -- DavidCary

All content must stay on C2 until it is ExtremelyInterstrangled. A ThrottledWiki with a long history of struggle and anguish is much better than a shiny new one full of enthusiastic editors trying, as TheAdjunct's SimpleRules? state way up top on rule #1, to be excellent to each other. We will be here forever, do you hear me? Forever! -- Pete.

Maybe we should just move the OnTopic content on programming elsewhere, since there seems to be so little interest in developing it here. Oh, that's right. We already have. It's been dispersed to hundreds of blogs, because so many people GaveUpOnWiki. </sigh>

That's funny; there seem to be thousands of pages on programming here; many of them actively edited, too. While this site has neighbors in the programming universe (blogs like ltu, other wikis like cliki, etc) - this place is still active and useful. Most of the people who GaveUpOnWiki did so because they no longer find wiki worth their time - which is fine, it's their call. OTOH, claiming that one's particular tastes are the only worthy content on wiki, and stating that wiki's failure to cater to those tastes are in fact evidence of wiki's decline, is a remarkably self-centered point of view.

I'm gonna found a new wiki called BestOfWiki. Any of the OnTopic pages on this wiki that are sterling high-quality, state-of-the-art discussions of SoftwareEngineering, we should move them from this wiki to my wiki immediately.

a beat

Does anyone realize there is no moral or ethical difference between my BestOfWiki site and TheAdjunct? Either way it's just stealing pages... -- PhlIp

If Ward made BestOfWiki a SisterSite, then the example would be relevant.

I don't understand how moving pages equates to "stealing" them (the pages still exist and everyone can still access them), but there is a signficant difference between your proposal and TheAdjunct even if moving pages is stealing. If there wasn't then garbage men would be criminals. -- EricHodges

PhlIp is right in some sense, and very wrong in another sense. To begin with, the operation of "moving" only confuses the discussion as far as "moral and ethical differences" are concerned. There are two operations that should be taken separately, at least prima facie. There's the operation of deleting text from C2 and there's the operation of adding text that was previously contributed to C2 to TheAdjunct. Deleting stuff from C2 is legitimate insofar as it contributes to cleaning up the wiki - whereas "cleanliness" is not a fixed, immutable scale but something that is continuously negotiated within the community. It is much more problematic to delete OnTopic than OffTopic material. I don't think anybody in his right mind would question in principl;e the legitimacy of deletions. Ifhe does, he should ask Ward to remove the delete feature.

Now adding text that was previously contributed to C2 to TheAdjunct is more problematic ("in theory", mind you) in so far as the original contributors may have agreed to contribute to C2 but not necessarily to TheAdjunct. Such a problem wouldn't exist on wikis that enforce open licensing (such as CreativeCommons, gnu documentations license, etc). But so far, only very recent pages have been moved to TheAdjunct most of the time with all the original contributors being aware of the move, so the problem is more theoretical than practical. So there's a very substantial "moral and ethical difference" between PhlIp's gedanken experiment and TheAdjunct. -- CostinCozianu

I agree! So, in celebration of our total alignment on this topic, I'm going to move your HomePage to http://www.zeroplayer.com/ ! --PhlIp

(did you rush to see if it's still here?;)

I'm assuming that you're making a point, and/or being humorous, but if I'm wrong, and you are making these comments in all seriousness, then you have missed some important context (which can of course be supplied by various people, me or otherwise, if that is the case). -- DougMerritt

CategoryWikiProgress in AugustZeroFive and OctoberZeroFive again