Robin Shannon asked:
4. Why a Wiki (or, To edit or not to edit)?
And I agree that this is the important question.
Marshall Poe answered:
To me, this is the most interesting question of all
because it
points up a conflict between two principles. On the one hand,
we want to be open and allow everyone to edit all content. On
the other hand, we want to gather and disseminate the sum of
human knowledge to everyone, free.
In mathematical terminology, the sum (e.g. "7") is not the same
thing as its terms (e.g. "3 + 4"). The sum can be computed from
the terms, but once you have the sum you can no longer determine
which the terms were. I think that Wikipedia, using wikis, should
disseminate the *sum* of human knowledge, because one person could
enter 3 and another could add 4 to it, resulting in the sum. But
this new proposed memoir project instead aims to present the
individual components or terms, each on their own. Other tools
than wikis, such as blogs, are better suited for that task.
There are plenty of technical tools out there for people who want
to set up their own blog, to report their individual memoirs.
There are also tools that help coordinate blogging on a larger
scale, such as del.icio.us for tagging, flickr for adding photos,
geobloggers.com for adding geographic coordinates, and most
recently the Google Blogsearch.
Wikipedia is also such a tool, as it allows bloggers to link to
encyclopedic articles that provide background knowledge on places,
people, and events. The occurance of such links is indeed a kind
of tagging. You can do a Google blogsearch to find 8 known blog
entries that link to the article [[en:Great Chicago Fire]],
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fw…
which is 8 times more than you'll find through
http://del.icio.us/tag/ChicagoFire
Some future incarnation of Wiktionary could also become such a
useful resource, but it isn't really there yet.
but the Wikisource *edition* of the Magna Carta will
only
become less valuable as it is edited further away from its
original, canonical state (the words as they were written in
1215).
Quite correctly, this is a weakness of Wikisource as it is now
conceived, and hardly a valid argument for using wikis for
memoirs.
Which is the superior principle? Id say its the
all-human-knowledge principle.
Nothing says one tool has to be useful for all situations.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se