Is Top Destroying Wiki

It seems that everything top touches turns to rust. The C2 is turning brown.

I don't think so. There are multiple people addressing his points - but never satisfactorily so. They never try to take his view which unconventional as it may be has its points and thus always talk at cross purposes never reaching him. And as he obviously has a lot of time it looks as if he is the cause. But he isn't. At least it's not him alone. This wiki always has welcomed controversial input and Tops isn't fundamentally different.

The rust you see may be the rust of age. This wiki has long since stopped being young. It has seen its best times and is old. Not old in the sense of decay (which we may see the first signs of) but of stability and experience. There are 30000 pages and you only see Top because you look for him and you see him in the recent changes.

The defenders of Top seem to be just those who like a scrap for its own sake, not those with any vision of PortlandPatternRepository. C2 is turning brown, but it ain't rust.

The focus here hasn't been the PortlandPatternRepository for a long, long time. It's true there's no "vision", but is that necessarily a bad thing? The worst that a "scrap" does is clutter up a page (and maybe RecentChanges). If you don't like it, create a new, better page that reflects the vision you think WardsWiki should have. If it has merit, maybe it will catch on.

It's a bad thing. A wiki is not a good forum for arguments. Why create a new, better page here? It'd be a waste of time. It is much wiser to move real content to other forums. Readership on C2 has dropped to a few word warriors in a worn down ghetto. What value has C2 to the wider world at this time? What value have you added, that hasn't been turned into a cluttered ThreadMess that no one (not even the participants) wish to read or edit?

If you feel it's that bad, why are you here?

I'm not here, really. I removed most of my content from this C2 years ago. I just poke in a few times each year to see if things have changed. And every time, I see people squabbling uselessly and defending their squabbling ways.

I don't know whether my contributions are of value or not; that's for others to judge. What value have you added?

None. All the value I attempted to add got turned into cluttered ThreadMess'es that no one (not even the participants) wish to read or edit. And, for a while, I became part of the problem.

As for Wiki's value to the wider world, I can only speak to what I use it for: I frequently point students to it as an example of what software developers are currently debating and consider contentious. I use it to encourage students to critique and evaluate debate, and to help form their own opinions and arguments based on the effectiveness of informal arguments they've read. The squabbles that go on here are -- for better or worse -- equivalent to the squabbles they'll encounter throughout their professional lives. Reading journal articles, magazine articles, textbooks and even technical blogs can produce the impression that everything is decided and agreed -- bar the inevitable squabbles in the "comment" section of blogs -- when that isn't the case.

There are better forums even for that purpose. The arguments on WikiWiki are not very representative.

(Do you mean better communication technology, or better existing forums? If the second, please link to them. If the first, this wiki is a reasonable compromise between multiple content "types". A better single-purpose technology may exist for certain content styles, but you'd likely be hard-wiring in a particular presentation or authoring style. And most "field squabbles" are over specific tools/vendors, such as Oracle versus Microsoft versus Google, etc., not general philosophy of design. Sometimes things do click: HowOtherQueryLanguagesAddressSqlFlaws, a multi-WikiZen effort, came out relatively well. -t)

I enjoy debating with Top, and he has as much right to participate here as anyone else. I accept that I will probably only ever agree with less than 1% of what he writes, but I also accept that his viewpoint is different from mine and I will defend -- with tooth and claw, if necessary -- his right to express it.

Yes, the debates sometimes result in ThreadMess, and it would be nice to clean up some of the ThreadMesses, but they reveal an occasional nugget of wisdom -- sometimes from Top, sometimes from his opponents -- that we'd never see in the absence of the ThreadMess.

In short, Top isn't destroying Wiki. Quite the opposite, in fact -- he's helping to keep it alive and lively.

ThreadMess should be viewed as the "brainstorming" stage, which is expected to be raw. If you are interested in creating a cleaner version of a given page, that would be great. However, please keep the original around, at least until both sides have a chance to compare it to the new version and agree with the summary or reconstitution. (I've tried to create summarized versions of such, but the importance and position of the summary points I gave was considered contentious. Turns out there's a lot of subjectivity to summarizing.) I would note that WikiPedia has the "front" topic page, and then a tab for "talk", which often has a ThreadMess of debate also. Both "types" of content serve a purpose. Contention is often ugly, but a necessary part of an open society. --top

There are also people who are around here and keep it tidy, for example by moving the recent changes to the monthly files. I do that and also keep uptodate the pages referring to some of the things of interest to me. I realise that many of the past contributors are not around on here any more. I hope there is a useful and interesting resource for those who do come now. -- JohnFletcher

CategoryMetaDiscussion

EditText of this page (last edited February 18, 2014) or FindPage with title or text search