Language Bridge To Wiki
Language Bridge To WikiUsually, I write software. This page describes some recent thinking about language and its usage in the wiki styles I see.
(LanguagePatternsAndWiki?)
Thoughts on the Wiki Way, and language patterns (not PatternLanguages).
Wiki is an interesting user interface concept, but the underlying structure of language and hypertext can support many representations.
Wiki supports easy collaborative knowledge sharing and easy creation of new concepts for discussion.
This is a natural fit with most disciplines, since practitioners often find existing terms and concepts inadequate, and coin new words with specific meanings to members of the community of practice.
The underlying structure can be thought of in terms of its linguistic representation, though. (Discussion of Deep Structures will be another chapter.)
Most terms are nouns with verbs, or noun phrases, such as
For example, ExtremeProgramming - new methods for software development
Noun Noun (NounNoun?) - typically defines a new thing or concept
For example, WikiWeb or PatternLanguage
Name Name (NameName?) - a proper name, a PeoplePersonorThing?
For example, WardCunningham
Todo:
Write about Communities of Practice and tie in to these pages. Think about a LanguageDictionary? of terms Practitioners use.
[I welcome comments and input on these pages -- RalphHyre]
This is a BreathOfFreshAir?. Is there a dictionary of WikiSemantics? or is this the place where it all starts?
Conducting a Boolean search for research being conducted on Wiki Language evolution and usage turned up little being done in the world of academia directly related to the topic, but did turn up this interesting paper, excerpted here: Language Use & Conceptual Change in Learning KLAS KARLGREN, ROBERT RAMBERG
Department of Computer and Systems Science
Stockholm University, Electrum 230, 146 40 Kista, Stockholm, Sweden
"In this paper we discuss theories of learning, especially physics, and the implications for instruction and design that these theories put forth. We further discuss assumptions regarding whether cognition is individually or socially based, and the traditional cognitivistic view that infers stored mental representations from observations of behavior. We question views that look upon concepts as things to be stored. In the course of discussing the theories we present a view of learning that focuses on language games and use of language in different activities and contexts. The language of a certain field of science, e.g., Newtonian theory of physics, is viewed as a specialized form of language with specific purposes. A scientifically correct Newtonian description of an idealized situation is a specialized form of speaking that may be counter-intuitive viewed from a common-sense perspective of the world that has entirely different goals. Learning a scientific language game is not viewed as replacing an old and "naive" knowledge structure as much as learning new activities and a new specialized language. In learning, people have to learn how to use a specific language by taking part in the activities in which the language is used, since the meaning of the new concepts are rooted in these activities. Understanding the concepts is thus coupled with participation in the new activities." (...) http://www.dsv.su.se/~robban/euro2.html
The search also turned up, on another academic site, an interesting EvilTwin and an argument why all WikiPages should have EditFunction?: http://biro.bemidjistate.edu/cgi/en1101f03.pl?TheSyllabus.
moved from EvilTwin
HEATHER JOHNSTON, Department of Mathematics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003
Homology manifold bordism: Everyone has an evil twin
Homology manifolds are spaces with the local homology, but not necessarily the local topology of manifolds. Bryant, Ferry, Mio and Weinberger have discovered a large class of examples of non-resolvable homology manifolds which have no manifold points whatsoever: For every simply connected topological manifold M of dimension > 5 and every integer congruent to 1 modulo 8, they constructed an "evil twin" homology manifold which is simple homotopy equivalent to M. Furthermore BFMW showed that there is a surgery exact sequence for homology manifolds.
The surgery exact sequence of BFMW implies that there are topological manifolds, such as high dimensional tori, which are not simple homotopy equivalent to any other homology manifolds. Nonetheless, every high dimensional topological manifold M has a "bordism evil twin" N for each integer congruent to 1 modulo 8: there are maps f: M ® N and g: N® M so that both compositions are normally bordant to the appropriate identity map. Various bordism and transversality results for homology manifolds follow from this result and the BFMW surgery exact sequence for homology manifolds.
http://www.cms.math.ca/CMS/Events/math2000/abs/tm.html
From the site: (Bemidjistate) "Now, imagine that someone read both of your paragraphs of description and said, Ok, these are good descriptions as descriptions go, detailed and all. But which one is true - not true to you but true to the world? I mean, how can you say that both are accurate? And if one is more accurate than the other, what makes it so?"
I don't think we talk about dimensions beyond 4 here, so the "simply connected topological manifold M of dimensions greater than 5", clearly belongs in another map. (An interesting concept, but not very clearly worded - I particularly like the "surgery exact sequence", especially with regard to non-solvable equivalence demonstrated in dimensions greater than 6. I think in images, so I am hindered in this respect, since the warp and bidirectional transversality are impossible to map in 3 dimensions.
For more, see: www.math.uiowa.edu/ftp/branson/paper19.ps and http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~aar/slides/icms.pdf.
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