@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.
@dredmorbius Sure! All of these are small incremental technological changes that together led to something big.
But Wikipedia isn't the only large Internet-age data project, is it?
What about the Internet Archive? Facebook? Amazon? Google itself?
What about data stored on web forums, and used to coordinate large projects?
Yes, I think versioned documents are one useful tool, but so too are threaded discussions and many others.
And in fact I think MediaWiki, Wikipedia's engine, does quite a poor job of even versioning - eg, if you delete a page it's just gone - and it also doesn't do threaded conversations AT ALL. People cope, but they'd cope better I think if they had threads available as well.
Wikipedia's also moving into Linked Data, which I think is maybe as significant as wiki pages, maybe more so.
@dredmorbius So what I'd like - what I've wanted for over ten years now - is a Weblike environment that offers:
* versioning
* linking
* threading
* realtime notification
* authentication and access control
* semantic data
* import and export
* search
all in one unified system. So we don't have to, eg, fire up a CMS, a Wiki, a web forum, a social media or chat channel, a database, and a source control system, just to manage one project.
@natecull KFC + webfs.
Keep in mind that the tendency to hubs is in part what gave us what we've got. Market towns (or booksellers shops, or libraries) have value. Signifiers of reputation and value, /as well as/ discoverability.
If HTML + HTTP had a few more features, we could eliminate much:
* A native ID assertion capability (/with/ the ability to log out goddamnit!).
* Threading as a native construct.
* Dynamic content control: sorting, expanding, collapsing threads.
@natecull Also of tables. Why HTTP has tables *but no native capability to work with tabular content* is something ... I don't understand.
* Notifications. RSS/Atom goes a long way to providing that.
I'd also like to see independence between /content/ and /framing/. Site-specific crud. In many cases I'd like to see the concept of a /site/ fall away virtually completely.
Not sure where you're going w/ import/export.
@dredmorbius Agree on all of this too.
The import/export thing is about how to fork or merge a project, really.
So many web technologies (including wikis!) use SQL RDBMSes to store their stuff that it's quite problematic to transfer content from one site to another.
If we didn't have a concept of a 'site' and if 'files' and 'tables' were all instances of collections of the same data (with versioning, yes) and you could fork and revert sites as easily as files, that'd be useful.
@natecull The real sticker on stuff like this is probably a combination of rights and finance.
* Rights: ensuring that some asshat can't shut you down with legal threats.
* Finance: finding /either/ a way to make the activity profitable, or make it an adjunct of a beneficial activity, such that it's self-sustaining.
The flipside of rights is that if a bunch of asshats try to make others' lives miserable through publishing stuff, well, that might not be so good either.
@dredmorbius Yep! Agree with all of this.
One thing I notice with systems like Mastodon is how the natural unit of text is NOT a 'page' but a sub-page unit.
In fact the tendency is to use HTML's 'page' just as a modern VT-100 talking to a a modern mainframe.
It might be nice if HTTP/HTML naturally had some kind of 'collection of sub-page units' ability,
Nate Cull (.social)
Dr. Edward Morbius ❌