Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net writes:
on 2/27/07 3:51 PM, Gwern Branwen at gwern0@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.