Test For Sameness

Moved from AreLispersTakingOverThisWiki, where the fact that "it's not a conspiracy and we've discussed it before" had been ... not exactly lost to history, but buried far enough down that someone didn't find it.

See also WikiIceberg. History has repeated itself, just a little bit, because of NamelessConcepts. The original poster picked what seemed to be the most appropriate term - what else can one do? - and missed the relevant material because there is no "concept search" facility.

The traditional solutions have been VillageElders? and later, a WellRoundedEducation... but these days they don't always cut it. NobodyReadsEveryPage any more, inside the wiki or out. We need a HashTable (AssociativeArray) of concepts, but the problem is our hashing functions often come out with different keys. -- MatthewAstley

(Yes, I've been thinking about the TestForSameness for a while now...)

NobodyReadsEveryPage, but the Wiki has a large population. It is important for good WikiZens to actively introduce links between pages that are similar as soon as the similarity is noticed. This promotes the use of BackLinks, which is one of the best ways to browse Wiki's AssociativeMemory.

I suppose the page title describes the noun, "that test which will determine sameness" and the imperative, "you should test for sameness!". Maybe it should be SearchForSameness? instead? -- m

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An attempt at the PatternPattern:

(by no means complete!)

Context:

• Alice has an idea which relates (or may relate) to a greater body of knowledge.
• Addition of the idea implicitly follows a search for the correct place to put it, so there is overlap here with simply asking a question without having the answer handy.
• (KnowledgeProliferation)

Problem: If the idea already exists and has been discussed, but Alice has not found it,

• adding it in another place violates OnceAndOnlyOnce
• Alice may suspect that her idea is not original, but won't get to see the previous work. She will probably waste some of her time on repeating that work.
• Other people may see Alice's work. If they know of the original work, they could point Alice to it, but they may not bother. If they don't know of the original, they may read Alice's work and join in the confusion.

Forces:

• The search for work on an idea could take a lot of effort, and may still fail to turn anything useful.
• Alice may be lazy or impatient. In the face of a huge task, it may not be clear how much effort is necessary or fair. Shortcuts always seem welcome.

Solutions:

• VillageElders? will carry (and often be happy to share) a body of knowledge going back tens or hundreds of years. This doesn't require writing.
• WellRoundedEducation to cover everything in enough detail to know where to start. KnowledgeProliferation knocked that on the head, to some extent.
• Literature review. Acquire some familiarity with a broad overview in some corner of knowledge, often before contributing formally.
• The FAQ, as a collection of recently or commonly used knowledge on some topic.
• ReadTheFineManual. Assuming there is one, and it's legible.
• On the Wiki,
  • Comprehensive forward links enable useful BackLinks.

Resulting Context:

• Too many lazy Alices cause the rest of the population to adopt an RtfmAttitude?.
• Too much knowledge and not enough searching power causes all Alices to be lazy.

Design Rationale:

Examples:

• MissingWikiBeforeXp, AreLispersTakingOverThisWiki, InvasionOfTheRelationalWeenies, ArePeopleWhoDontWantYouToRealiseTheyreTakingOverTheWikiTakingOverTheWiki?.

Related Patterns:

• As far as "crawling along a mesh of ideas" goes: MappersVsPackers, MindMap.
• In WikiNavigationPattern, WhenToCreatePages.
• RememberingIdeas? or FindingInformationTheSecondTime?. Try http://ijhcs.open.ac.uk/tauscher/tauscher-nf.html
• SameThingSameName

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Discussion

I have failed to address my original question, which is the test itself. Deciding whether two things are the same appears to be a fundamental part of intelligence that we have failed to nail down, so far. I'll have a go at that "later", but naturally I would appreciate help because I'm just as lazy as Alice above.

Things get more complicated when two parties fail to properly match ideas before continuing with a discussion about them. They're likely to disagree violently. -- MatthewAstley

I hope not too violently. Also, WikiGnomes will be quietly working in the background, cleaning up the pages. ThreadMode will be gently reduced to DocumentMode, FaqMode, and DialecticMode. This will attenuate the effect but do nothing to address the problem of eliminating redundancy at its inception. Oh, well.

Yes, we (hopefully) all hope "not too violently" but still it seems to go that way. Also, the idea I'm chasing is more general than the its application to Wiki. -- m