Reproductive Ethics

You can never find a WikiMaster when you need one. -- RonJeffries

Good point. The discussion that's just been removed demonstrated amply the TragedyOfTheCommons on Wiki. Ray and I were not going to converge on this page; much more likely we were on the verge of enmity. Name-calling is a plain sign of communications breakdown. Also pretty far from Ray's RulesToLiveBy :-).

The WikiNature remedy is plain - act like a WikiMaster and ditch the bones of contention. Perhaps this is Ron's qualitative difference between wiki and WikiStoneSociety: on wiki one can edit unilaterally, where WikiStoneSociety puts contentious issues to trial-by-market. -- PeterMerel

One needs a mechanism to handle contentious issues - in the context of WikiStoneSociety, perhaps it should be in the form of a POV (Point of View) hierarchical decomposition from the moderated pattern/topic name. And link the views in an explicit way (I like some kind of local navigator "pop-up" that shows the hyper-linkage in the narrative neighborhood) This doesn't seem too far from some of the WikiStoneSociety ideas, maybe just an addition.

Yes, that sounds like one way to present things.

A Wiki is like a society in which everyone goes armed. I don't like what you say: blam! It's gone. Such power. But everyone else has the same power, and they can kill my stuff too. That makes me scared. In practice, we're wary and consensus rules. As RobertHeinlein would say, an armed society is a polite society. As ThomasHobbes? would say, all editors are equal - any may kill another's text.

I think that's a problem - we're too polite. It takes a degree of courage to restructure a Wiki page and we tend to be scared we'll get it wrong, remove something someone thought was important and cause offense. Thus the problem is too little editing rather than too much.

Wiki is an organic system. Organic systems must restructure (refactor) as they grow to accommodate new growth. See SystemsAsLivingThings. One way to do this is to build consensus among contributors to several pages about how to refactor them. Permission through email. Cooperation to build more intelligence into the structure of how info is presented on some pages in Wiki.

-- MichaelFeathers

I think that what distinguishes an organic-style system from a mechanical-style one is summed up as OrganicArchitecture. Wiki seems to qualify at present, but all the various issues in InterWiki remain to be solved.

re: (deleted) suggestion to allow page deletions: As to pruning pages, I'm not certain that's appropriate. Do you prune your own memories? Sure, you tend to shuffle some of the unused ones away, but that's more to do with improving access times than losing information. If you think hard enough, you can generally remember anything you ever learned. Why shouldn't wiki work like that too?

-- PeterMerel

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What exactly are ReproductiveEthics and what does the content here have to do with them? How does reproduction have to do with ethics? Biological reproduction, or copying text? -- BayleShanks

CategoryEthics