@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?
@natecull How would you organise Wikipedia /without/ basing it on a version-control system?
What would that do to the project?
@dredmorbius Yes, I've stated several times that versioning is *one* of the things that allowed Wikipedia.
But so is electricity.
@natecull Electricity has been part of publishing since the late 19th century. Electronic data systems have existed since the 1950s. Personal and business-use systems since the 1970s. Networked since the 1980s. Public internet, since the 1990s.
And yet until 2001, putting together the Web, version control, Markdown, and hypertext, /and/ the appropriate social context and goal, you didn't have a WIkipedia.
@natecull You didn't have anything /close/ in scale to Wikipedia.
Yes, there were precursors, but ... how to say? Nothing with the social and cultural significance.
Hell, I've been reading a 2006 systems admin guide which still feels /it/ has to make the case for using Wikis /in a technical, professional workplace/.
(O'Reilly, "Time Management for Systems Administrators".)
Nate Cull (.social)
Dr. Edward Morbius ❌