What Would We Lose

What would we lose if we lost the wikiweb? Well, for a start, a community. Good communities are hard to find. Plus we'd lose the interconnections between the pages, which imho are more important than the isolated content. I wouldn't read wiki if it were a book - all those little pages would be as annoying as hell - but the SmallWorld links here make the content much more valuable. And we'd lose the group-mind - the well trod pathways of discourse and feedback that make this a good place to float an idea and watch it get shot at.

But in reality, we wouldn't lose anything. Wiki would just reincarnate somewhere else. The discontinuity wouldn't be pleasant - just today I went looking for the InterWiki stuff that was on TomStambaugh's apparently defunct MuWebWeb and was annoyed not to find it - but wiki would self-assemble again. It is immortal, after all. -- PeterMerel

from: WikiStoneSociety