@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).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

@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?

http://historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=2876

@natecull How would you organise Wikipedia /without/ basing it on a version-control system?

What would that do to the project?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nupedia

@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.

@dredmorbius

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.

@natecull On threaded discussions, @woozle keeps trying to convince me to use various Wiki tools on his constellation of sites. Which ... pretty much always leave me 1) confused and 2) screaming from styling conventions.

I'm fairly happy with how my re-styled subreddit appears, generally. Though I'm still partial to Scoop's dynamic thread expansion/collapse. @rustyk5 FTW.

@dredmorbius (cc: @natecull @rustyk5 ) You need to *tell* me if there are issues.

MediaWiki can be restyled either on a per-user basis or globally by editing a page.

I'm not sure what to do about the

@rustyk5 @natecull @dredmorbius

(somehow my toot didn't get finished before sending)

[I'm not sure what to do about the] confusion; I guess I need to know how it's confusing.