[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[Gwern Branwen]

Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> writes:

> on 2/27/07 3:51 PM, Gwern Branwen at gwern0 at gmail.com wrote:
>
>> If you want to force the community in a direction, then code is 
   the
>> most effective way. It is not very polite or considerate, but 
it certainly
>> works.
>
> Your entire post intimidated me ;-) and bullied me :-) into 
reading more
> Lessig - thanks. The section I pulled out above intrigues the 
hell out of
> me; I would love to know more.
>
> Marc Riddell

Well, I'm glad to hear that. And you certainly have no excuse not 
to read the second edition <http://codev2.cc/>, given that it's 
under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License!

To briefly expand on my comments: what the developers create is 
the very fabric of Wikipedia. I am not even joking here: what they 
write makes things possible and impossible to think on 
wiki. Technical changes have definitely had their effects on the 
wiki - the most crucial part of a wiki is technical, like anon 
editing or wikimarkup - both subtly and overtly. We used to use a 
lot of subpages; now subpages are practically an alien concept 
except as applied in userspace and for archiving talk pages. (A 
lot of people don't even bother to archive, though, or just 
wikidelete their talk page every so often, or let a bot do all the 
work). Why is this? I noticed the abandonment of subpages started 
around the time a number of templates like {{main}} and 
{{seealso}} were introduced. If this is true, then there didn't 
even need to be official deprecation or restrictions to shift 
editing habits in a significant way. 

Again, 'code is law'. I hope the developers can keep this 
perspective in mind when they try to understand why some people 
get worked up about captchas for account creation, accounts for 
page creation, restrictions on the newest 1% of accounts, 
oversight and OFFICE, and so on.

-- 
Gwern
Inquiring minds want to know.