The Adjunct

The Adjunct was a UseMod wiki, now only available in archived form at:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://grault.net/adjunct/

Set up in 2005, its aim was to provide a home for material that is flagged here as being OffTopic; all topics were welcome. If someone marked your page as being OffTopic, or deleted it for being OffTopic, you could feel free to give it a new home there. Guidance as to whether a page should be here or on the Adjunct was found at MovingPagesToTheAdjunct.

WardCunningham graciously added it as a SisterSite to this wiki. (It already had this wiki, and others, as its SisterSites.)

As of late 2012, no meaningful editing had taken place on the Adjunct in some time, so I made it read-only (a FishBowl). While it attracted a small amount of activity at the time of its creation, this rapidly fell off in parallel with the general decline in editing here at WardsWiki. Also, at some point it stopped appearing as a SisterSite of this wiki, making it hard to find the content; I suspect that made the problem worse.

Unfortunately, due to some real-life issues taking up a lot of my attention, in late 2014 I managed to allow the domain name registration to expire. I am sincerely sorry for this. Thankfully, the WaybackMachine has preserved a copy of the site for posterity at the URL above. I also still have all the original data; if someone wants to host it in read-only mode somewhere else, drop me a note on my user page.

ThankYou to everyone who participated in it while it was active. -- EarleMartin

What is the purpose of censoring "off topic" content? This Wiki has an exquisite and comprehensive feeling and character, dripping with programmerdom on every page, and its influential discussions of Principles Practices and Patterns are only supported by its occasional discussion of FrankZappa or DoctorWho.

I've got no problem with side discussions. I just don't think they merit the permanence that on-topic discussions do. This was once a great place to research patterns and programming issues. Now, you can barely find that stuff. There's still good information here, but you have to go elsewhere to find the pointer to the right pages.

There have always been disagreements as to what is OffTopic and what is not, and what should stay or go regardless. The fact that the Adjunct has appeared has done nothing to change that, it merely offers another place to host pages.

The point is that if someone wants a page, but there's consensus that it should go away, they now have the alternative to move it to the Adjunct rather than be sad that it is continually deleted.

That is a very different thing than assuming that, anytime one person thinks a page can be deleted, it therefore will be, so long as a copy is made to the Adjunct. That's getting the point of it backwards.

There was never any reason to assume so, that's simply confusion.

Please help both TheAdjunct and this Wiki to improve its coherence by incrementally refactoring marginal content towards topicality, and by making TheAdjunct a place topical and coherent in its own best way.

Ask Earle

Q: What is the policy on banning users?
A: Only one person is definitively banned from the Adjunct - a known long-term abuser of this site. Everyone else is welcome. On the other hand, if anyone decides to start behaving like an ass (being abusive is the simplest example), I will kick them out without warning. I don't care if they are "right" or "wrong"; I won't tolerate bad behavior.
Q: Is there a commitment to pluralism on the Adjunct?
A: As the administrator of the site I am committed to pluralism as long as people behave themselves. See above. -- EarleMartin

For a commitment to pluralism to bear fruits one of the following conditions have to be met:

all participants are committed to pluralism
there's a GodKing (or a political power of some sort) at work that is totally committed to pluralism
commitment to pluralism is enforced by technology

I wouldn't have any problem contributing to any on-line forum where RK is also present, provided that pluralism is achieved in some way. RK has an inalienable right to air his points of view as forcibly and as powerfully as he sees fit, on the sole condition that he doesn't try to aquire unfair advantages in the marketplace of ideas or otherwise undermine pluralism. Heck, even RA should be granted "air space". Obviously the most principled approach would be (3) and I'm working on it. (2) has been known to work, for example at WikiPedia. -- Costin

I agree that one or more of 1 through 3 would be necessary; at this point in history, that's common sense. (1) is not apparently enforceable, short of hand-picking allowed participants, (2) is obviously possible, but most GodKings are not committed to pluralism, and (3) isn't currently implemented yet. -- Doug

"This was once a great place to research patterns and programming issues. Now, you can barely find that stuff. There's still good information here, but you have to go elsewhere to find the pointer to the right pages."

I'm not clear how MovingPagesToTheAdjunct solves the root problem of not finding stuff. Wouldn't the effort of deleting OffTopic material be better spent on the usual WikiGnome activities of categorization, interlinking pages and cleaning up content? In my experience, the pages not of interest simply aren't visited because you don't click on their links. -- IanOsgood

I agree with your logic. MovingPagesToTheAdjunct solves a different problem. And up until Google stopped indexing c2 (GoogleHatesWiki) and destroyed most of its old index on c2, I hardly ever had trouble finding things here, so I don't really understand/sympathize with the complaint to start with.

Other people have complained that new material of interest to them isn't being created, but hey, as (someone) on the old SaturdayNightLive? said, "if you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own". :-) Seriously, when I note something missing from c2 (and if I care, naturally), I create it or ask about it. Seems straightforward to me. -- DougMerritt

Hello Earle et al. Two BIG thumbs up to the Adjunct. Excellent work and definitely a very valuable contribution to this wiki and the larger wiki community -- StevenNewton

Definitely See MovingPagesToTheAdjunct. But contrast DisregardTheAdjunct.

I think you should call it the CompostPile?, then you could just leave it here on this wiki and people could put back and reuse paragraphs of content that got shifted out of the wiki. Or it would just get eliminated as is natural in the WikiWay, but a temporary holding spot is wise for those who like to delete content and a known spot where people can look. (If only WikiZens could select a section and then hit a "Compost it." button which would send it there with a header containing from where and the date.)

Sounds like HomelessContent.

To understand some of the history, read DotDotDot to get a sense of the strength of feeling there was around here in 2005 to 2007.

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