Wiki Change Proposal

The basic idea is to set up an AttentionEconomy (with ratings, feedback and everything) that will allow people to disagree, without ever having the need to EditWar, to generate unnecessary heat, or to abandon the public space to aggressors who refuse honest debates. Also, no particular contributor is empowered to inflict his abrasiveness/rudeness/noise upon the others.

Any of the parties in a heated disagreement can fend off an EditWar by simply creating their own version of the story, without suffering any disadvantage. If there should be an EditWar or heated argument, that means both parties enjoy it, and even then a third party can intervene and prevent both sides from imposing their noise upon the community.

WikiReaders will be able to have a say (vote with their feet), and WikiGnomes will be able to take responsibility and be acknowledged for the hard work that they are already doing.

Ok, those were the main selling point; the technical details are found below.

Honor and credit needs to go to CliffordAdams who thought of it and proposed it first with another name, ViewPoint. He thought about it even before he first proposed ViewPoint, in the form of a rating and filtering system for UseNet moderation. WikiChangeProposal has only inconsequential differences from the original. I had to suffer the embarrassment of reinventing the wheel and bragging about it, but I'm honestly relieved that I can give credit to him. -- CostinCozianu

Update October 05: A working proof of concept has been shown at WikiSym to a very small audience. I have yet to perform private demos for WardCunningham and HelmutLeitner. I thought I'd be the last person in the world to implement a wiki, as I see myself more comfortable as a user of wiki software, but the thing is if you advocate some features you have to show they can be implemented easily. I'll publish the software in a very short time as OpenSource, and work on improving it from there, maybe with the help of some friends and with the feedback from the c2 community. I could have used some help before this point, but I was very reluctant to ask because I am a strong believer in InitialEffortShowsCommitment. I'd like to encourage anybody with some Java programming skills or people with analytical skill (able to spot real requirements to be added or dubious features to be removed) to feel free to contact me for contributing to this project, or just fork the whole or get some part of it and incorporate it in another wiki project. If there was a WikiEngine out there that beat me to these features, I'd be relieved of a great burden. -- CostinCozianu

Now that the initial effort has been done to some satisfactory level, I'll refactor and enhance the discussion in a series of WcpXxx? pages, where wcp stands for WikiChangeProposal and is a nice short moniker for project, package name and the likes.

See WcpPages for all pages.

The "philosophy" behind it

Implementation issues

CategoryWiki, CategoryWikiProgress, CategoryWikiChangeProposal

EditText of this page (last edited March 8, 2006) or FindPage with title or text search