Web Unique Content

This is part of PatternLanguageForTheWeb.

I have a good friend who is extremely knowledgeable and thoughtful about the Civil War, the music of Dylan, poetry, and many other things. He is a fascinating conversationalist, with much to contribute to the world of ideas. Yet his plan for his personal Web site is to provide links that go nowhere, pages that contain a single sentence that makes no sense, and other "strange" items intended to disorient people without providing actual content.

If this is all my friend does, it will be a real loss for the Web. While such shenanigans can be entertaining and artistic if executed well, they do not reflect my friend's actual personality as required by WebKnownAuthor, they will be at best of momentary interest, and they could be done by anyone, while few people could provide such thoughtful discourse in my friend's many areas of expertise.

In my own case, my favorite piece of music is Shostakovich's 8th string quartet. But while I consider it one of the greatest works of art in the 20th century, I am not versed enough in music or (yet) in the history of Shostakovich to have anything unique to say. So rather than providing a content-less page or reiterating what others have already said, I simply state my appreciation of this piece and provide a link to a site whose author provides unique and fascinating content about this music:

http://www.futurenet.com/classicalnet/composers/features/shostakovich/secrets.html.

Therefore: Each page of a Web site should provide unique content that comes from the heart and personality of the author. There should be very few if any pages that could have been expressed in exactly the same way by any other person. To do otherwise is to sap the vitality out of your Web site, waste people's time, and ultimately weaken the overall experience of the Web.

Before you create a page, search to see if similar content is available elsewhere. Link rather than replicate.

Contributors: RonaldHayden, DaveHarris

I am struck by the difference between your philosophy and that of the WikiWikiWeb. Wiki depreciates authorship. We are encouraged to start poor pages, so that others can improve them. It is better to write something than to write nothing. Is not everything you create unique? -- DaveHarris

On WikiWiki, a bad page will be improved by others. On the rest of the WorldWideWeb, a bad page will stay bad, and just make finding good content harder. So, "add value to the Web by leaving out that without" (adapted from ExtremeProgrammingMaster). -- FalkBruegmann

When I load any Wiki page, not only do I encounter an author, I usually encounter many authors, explicitly named and easily contacted! Therefore I would consider Wiki to be the ultimate in authorship. The fact that Wiki is composed of a bunch of collaborating authors is only an implementation detail. -- RonaldHayden

Much of Wiki is in ThreadMode, but it aspires to DocumentMode. Many documents are left unsigned, written in 3rd person, the property of the community rather than individuals. I have been criticized myself (on the WikiInterpolatedComments page) for placing too much emphasis on authorship. So I still think Wiki deprecates it more than the Web. -- DaveHarris

You are right that we should avoid the rule of experts: uniqueness and expertise are not a matching set. I do not mean to imply that I wouldn't create a Shostakovich page because I'm not an expert; rather, because many Shostakovich pages do exist, I wouldn't create one because I have nothing to say that I cannot locate (and point to) elsewhere on the Web, said better than I could have done it. Better for everyone if I spend my time on those few areas where that is not the case. -- RonaldHayden