Wiki Is Not About Debate

Wiki allows you to hold ThreadMode discussions, but its flexibility allows much more.

As WardCunningham said in ThreadModeConsideredHarmful: There are many places on the net better than here to hold a conversation. And there are many better ways to publish a web page too. Wiki is different. As the founder of wiki I thank those who struggle to make its difference an advantage.

There is a time and a place for conversation, debate, and even perhaps argument. But you do Wiki a service if in the end, when every opinion has been thrashed out, you put in some extra work to integrate them into Wiki in a way that respects all alternatives, but speaks in a unified voice. Imagine that an impartial and intelligent observer has heard the whole debate, and that they try to sum it up respecting all sides. One approach to this is the SummaWay, but please invent others.

Maybe the Wiki community would be willing to go cold turkey on RecentChanges for a while to see what difference that would make to the integrity of what's built here. In some ways, Ward (above) is understating the value of the current Wiki as a place to hold a conversation among many people, where attendance is wide open. RecentChanges, more than anything else about Wiki, fuels debate over dissertation. The thrill of high visibility and quick feedback drive this dynamic of low discipline work. How about it?

We need balance, rather than just DocumentMode.

Quality is a moving target. There is quality in interaction, but not all ThreadMode interactions seem to have it. Confession time. Sometimes we just feel like debating for its own sake. There is also quality in the distilled wisdom that emerges from a good debate. It appears that many of the pages here are not making the transition. They are no longer active; nor are they compact and informative. So they fall to an in-between and lower quality state. Somebody has to care about this, or it's not going to change. There's a good bit of laziness lurking, and Ward doesn't seem to be cracking the whip. ;->

This summarizes very well one of the key motivations of the old-time WikiReductionists. [Note that we look like we won the three month election on the theory but only after losing the half day war on the experiment. Simply badly judged starting places? I doubt it, taboos being what they are. What I think Wiki really needed was half a day's theory followed by a three month experiment to test it followed by a vote. But anyhow.] Just to restate the case: we argued that it would be better for Wiki if some of what you call "no longer active ... non compact and informative ... in-between and lower quality state" pages were simply deleted. This was in recognition of the very great theoretical difficulties of refactoring them without loss of meaning (see my hardly started efforts on the LinguisticsOfWiki?) and the observable fact that refactoring wasn't happening at anything like the rate most Wikizens judged was necessary to preserve overall quality.

Refactoring is difficult because it might cause loss of meaning, and so it's better to delete the page entirely?! *huh huh!* Surely I've missed your point! -- BenTremblay

I endorse almost everything Stephan now says at the foot of WikiReductionists. But if a gentle consensus could be reached and practical safeguards put in place, I continue to feel that Wiki would be better for the removal of ThreadMode that is widely acknowledged not to have made the grade for future generations of readers, even it was good, informative, amusing or cathartic at the time. I acknowledge RonJeffries' and TomStambaugh's principled objections to this view as stated in DeletionInWiki and elsewhere. -- RichardDrake

Interestingly enough Wiki is an experiment in self-organization. Order actually does emerge spontaneously from chaos and Wiki is one place where you can watch it happen. Nothing will get refactored here until someone actually does the refactoring. Some pages here are clean and clear and easy to read and some (most) aren't. It's the chaotic ones that get the most attention. Much as people complain about the mess it's only the messy places that they choose to inhabit. -- PhilGoodwin

At the risk of being precious: the information content in a chaotic system doesn't come into existence when we become aware of the order (oh Lord, I really wanted to avoid esse est percipi) ... a chaotic system is information rich, else it would be plain-vanilla random i.e. entropy rich. I think what happens is that the order that's ummm potential in the material comes to the surface, if you will allow; the signal rises out of the noise ... or the noise is reduced, just as the impurities are left behind when we purify gold by pounding it. -- BenTremblay

Another way of saying that, Ben, is that we beat the crap out of some issues. Gotta go along with that one, babe.

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