@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
@natecull Wikipedia: 5.4 million English articles, 40 million overall, 500 million unique monthly readers, 18 billion pageviews, 40k high-quality articles (about the same as Britannica's total), 68m registered users, 600k active (I'm presuming "editors" here), 3,500 editors with >100 edits/mo.
I challenge you to match this with /any/ other published work, particularly over the timescale (16 years).
@dredmorbius I'm not entirely disagreeing with you.
Scale *does* matter.
But I think perhaps you're confusing two separate things here - at least your initial argument did, when you ascribed the consequences of one thing (mass public collaboration enabled by electronic communication) to a specific *form* of communication ("versioned document").
I argue that the second has in fact been among us for millennia.
It's *electronic computers* which have enabled to scale this up.
@dredmorbius I mean, sure, if you choose to define "versioned document" literally AS "Wikipedia, with its huge number of articles and editors and readers".... then yes, I suppose you could combine scale and versioning into one thing.
But there are many wikis - even Ward's Wiki, the one that *invented* the concept - that are much smaller and did not scale as Wikipedia did.
And there are many web-scale comms systems (Facebook, Amazon) that aren't especially Wiki-like.
@natecull I hope it's abundantly clear that I am not /equating/ Wikipedia to a versioned document.
But it is an /exemplar/ (and almost certainly the prime one) of the class.
What did Diderot do? Was or was that not noteable?
@dredmorbius Eg, one of the things that made Wikipedia work was a deliberate commitment to "being an encyclopedia", which narrowed its scope, gave it an immediate useful purpose (which precursors like C2 or H2G2 or Everything2 - didn't have), and allowed for community judgements on what was or wasn't "in the house style" and "notable".
If we compare Wikipedia to its non-wiki precursors and rivals (whose names I've forgotten), yes the open-editing concept enabled scale...
@natecull There are two ways to approach critical success.
One is to look at what /contributed to success/.
Another is looking at what /didn't get the fuck in the way of it/.
In /any/ mass-adoption phenomenon, there's going to be a pretty significant degree of blind luck and path dependency. But not getting in your own damned way is also hugely useful.
There are plenty of failures to consider -- most of them involve some degree of self-sabotage.
@dredmorbius Right.
I think what I'm trying to say is that the concept you keep calling 'version' is actually 'massive easy-access collaboration'.
With 'versioning', or some other form of safeguarding against bad changes, being one of several necessary *but not sufficient* enabling techniques.
because versioning has been around for millennia, but massive public collaboration hasn't.
Nate Cull (.social)
Dr. Edward Morbius ❌