@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.
@natecull @dredmorbius Actually, deleted pages are visible to admins and can be recovered with a couple of clicks.
Agreed on threaded convos -- with two caveats:
1. Look on the talk page for any popular article, and you'll see threaded discussions with essentially hand-made threads.
2. I use an extension called LiquidThreads for threaded discussions. There are issues with the UI, but the underlying design seems sound. There's another I haven't tried yet.
Yes, 'essentially hand-made threads' is what I'm referring to when I say that MediaWiki doesn't have *actual* threads.
People sort of cope doing it manually instead of having the real thing, yes. But it would be nice to not set our goals at 'sort of coping around the edges of our technology'.
Not a gripe at MediaWiki especially, but that a thing doesn't yet exist which combines Wiki/Threads/Blogs/Toots into a single tech.
@dredmorbius @woozle And I was aware that there was a separate admin-only interface for deleted pages.
That just kind of highlights my point, though: *why* are pages in a wiki (any wiki) treated so differently than normal edits? Why can anyone create a page, but only admins can delete/undelete? Why not just version *page create/delete events themselves*?
Cf a source control system, where file create/deletes *are* just ordinary changes. At least I assume they are.
@woozle @dredmorbius I do agree though that MediaWiki's 'Talk' page was a huge step forward and (along with authenticated users) is a large part of what was missing in Ward Cunningham's original Wiki concept and early similar systems.
Talking the meta-discussions out of the page itself very much improved the quality of the product. As, I think, did the 'encyclopedia' concept which focused a community around *being* a product (which, eg, H2G2 and Everything2 didn't have).
@strypey @dredmorbius @natecull That gets into issues I'm trying to address with the "structured debate" concept, I think.
"Minority reports" are generally going to differ on particular points, which may lead to different conclusions.
The way I look at it: if a fact or piece of logic is in question, that calls for a structured debate.
@woozle @strypey @dredmorbius There are some subjects that simply are not going to achieve closure in a 'single universal encylopedia' format, I think.
Eg I have an interest in psi phenomena, but I know that Wikipedia will not give this subject an adequate treatment because there's a strong faction that will just delete everything and replace it with links to James Randi.
I have no interest in arguing. I just know I can't trust Wikipedia for this information.
@dredmorbius @strypey @woozle And that's fine - I'm an adult, the web is big, and I can search. It's okay as long as nobody is trying to force me to use Wikipedia as my one source of knowledge.
It might be nice to be able to use unified tools while participating in disjoint communities, though.
Nate Cull (.social)
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Woozle Hypertwin
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