Winners Write The History

From ErasingPainfulMemoriesDiscussion.

If everything becomes DocumentMode, valuable information may be lost. Paradigms shift like tectonic plates. Should auld Gondwanaland be forgot?

IMO, c2 is science, and science is process, not product. (Technology is product.)

We may have a lot to learn from the losers. And the losers may inherit the earth.

Don't go all threadbare DocumentMode on me!

-- TomRossen

Tom, your concern is respectable, but are you acting in response to a specific instance of Wiki erasing controversial opinion, or are you simply hypothesizing? I ask because it's my experience that most refactorers have been fairly conscientious about trying to maintain most divergent opinions. (Of course, others may say differently about my own work.) -- francis

Francis, it's a combination of the generall discussion in ErasingPainfulMemoriesDiscussion, attempting to reconstruct the sequence of the various skirmishes between XP lovers and haters (which is hard for a newbie in the absence of dates on the threads, btw), and some residual frustration at having my own pages deleted with next to no explanation. (Actually, the latter was a good thing, because it forced me to rethink the stuff; also, I understand the WalledGarden problem now too.)

The XP controversy history is messy, but given a choice between the mess and a complete elimination of the controversy, I'll take the mess. It's educational to see the kind of chaos historians have to deal with. Maybe we need an extension of the theory of wiki refactoring to deal with the issues of preserving the core of the dialectic while trimming the noise. That would mean that the winners have to discipline themselves to distinguish the losers' positions from noise. -- tr

The reason those skirmishes are unclear has nothing to do with the efforts of later refactorers. Those skirmishes are unclear because they are very much a document of the moment. When you have five people arguing heatedly across twenty different pages, they know each other well enough not to always sign, and they're all responding to points on different pages because at the time all of them are checking RecentChanges or QuickChanges religiously ... You're never going to get people to religiously sign-and-post all their posts, all the time, for two reasons: 1. That's way too much structure, but Wiki's supposed to be all about PiecemealGrowth, and 2. That's a pain in the ass, but Wiki's supposed to be fun.

Wiki and history have an odd, uncomfortable relationship. I personally don't think Wiki history is that important, not nearly as important as diving in and learning to Wiki yourself. (In a similar vein, I could've studied art history in college, but I studied art instead.) -- f

I'm sorry if it seemed that I was implying the mess was a result of refactoring. Just the opposite - I knew it wasn't, and I was suggesting that if it had been refactored to DocumentMode it might well have lost useful information.

Objection: Refactoring retains all useful information, by definition. If pages are changed such that they lose useful information, then they're not being refactored properly.

I'm not proposing history for history's sake, but more as a potential corrective to the current-consensus-snapshot-bias of DocumentMode. I like the idea (can't remember which page) of a double line to set off a DocumentMode header from a (possibly refactored, but flavor-preserving) ThreadMode. I really do think of the c2 wiki process as science, and the history of science is critical to the scientific process.

WikiPagesExistOutsideOfTime.

Winners? Do you mean I've been wikiing all this time and not been tracking my score? Silly me, I thought this was about communicating and learning. I recently summarized-up a conversation where I was wrong - does that even further lower my score? (-: (-:

Owwwch! Okay - there are no winners or losers in Wiki. And ideal refactoring would lose no information. In this case, the "winner" is the person refactoring the page. I wouldn't want to refactor the TabliZer's pages, because I'm not objective where said pages are concerned, and information that might be valuable would be likely to disappear.

Maybe this page should go away, because the more I think about it, the more I realize it's just a matter of having faith that the WikiZens who attempt this kind of refactoring will do it Wikily, so as not to lose the diversity PaulFeyerabend (not to be confused with TheFeyerabendProject) thinks is critical to scientific process. As I've said, I think this Wiki HasThatProcess?. -- TomRossen

"Okay - there are no winners or losers in Wiki..." Here's a different take: because the editor of the moment is the current winner, it makes it very easy for anyone to "win" (make a change). I believe this relates nicely to the way DoomGame? can become somewhat dull if you invoke GodMode. -- MatthewAstley

Re art and art history - I'm reminded of Dali's and Hockney's very different uses of the techniques of the Old Masters. And have you seen this: http://www.whitehouseanimationinc.com/kunstbar.htm ? -- tr

CategoryWiki CategoryHistory CategoryCommunication