Nate Cull (.social)Jun 11, 2017

@dredmorbius On the subject of "versioned documents" (as in, Wiki or source-control type systems that publish all previous editions of a document or a set of files, annotated with discussion)

1. I'm still not sure that this is a completely new thing in history. Religious and legal communities (in ancient times, the same groups) have had extensive traditions of "texts, anf commentaries on the texts" for millennia. Eg Judaism's Midrash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midrash

Show threadNate Cull (.social)

@dredmorbius

2. To the extent that electronic publishing is new, the newness resides in a matter of scale, as you say.

But a particular complication that the "versioned document" (or as I'd rather describe it, document *archive*) presents is that it's NOT in fact a document ( a fixed thing) - it's a PUBLISHER. Or a broadcaster.

The point being that you can take Wikipedia-the-publisher offline and lose a large part of what makes it different from ordinary documents.

Jun 11, 2017 at 12:50amWeb
Show threadNate Cull (.social)Jun 11, 2017

@dredmorbius Git trees are theoretically more robust to central attacks, as theoretically anyone can pull and push from anywhere. In theory.

In practice, though, everyone uses Github, who have taken on the "publisher" role for a format which was designed to not require or tend towards central publishers. Which seems a bit of a problem to me.

Show threadDr. Edward Morbius ❌Jun 11, 2017
@natecull The tendency to centralise is problematic. A multi-hubbed Git would help.
Show threadNate Cull (.social)Jun 11, 2017

@dredmorbius The thing is that git as a protocol doesn't have the concept of 'hub' at all - every user is their own hub. At least as far as I understand git, which is not very much.

(Sidebar: Why is git so complicated to understand? Shouldn't 'apply change to document' be something roughly as understandable as 'add two integers'? If not, why not?)

So git should not have led to Github, but it did. Much like Bitcoin should not have centralised processing in China, but it did.

Show threadDr. Edward Morbius ❌Jun 11, 2017
@natecull Git doesn't have the notion of a hub, but the concept of curating, finding, searching, and sharing content tends strongly toward that. See what I wrote earlier about large libraries and search costs.
Show threadDr. Edward Morbius ❌Jun 11, 2017

@natecull Scale *MATTERS*.

A jet airplane is an oxcart. At scale.

A hydrogen bomb is Greek Fire. At scale.

Amazon is the corner hardware store. At scale.

Yes, Wikipedia is, in one sense of the word, a publisher. But it's a publisher like none other in the history of the world, in terms of:

* Who can participate.
* Who can access.
* How much it's written.
* On what topics.
* With what update frequency.

Earlier encyclopedias might be updated every few _decades_.