[Foundation-l] Google Wave and Wikimedia projects

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/5/30 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
> A: "What's your favorite color?"
> B: "I like red"
> C: "I like green"
> D: "Red and green?  Are you nuts?  Blue is the best color of all?"
> A: I agree with B, red is definitely the nicest color.
> C: But isn't the wavelength of green so much more asthetically pleasing?
>
> How do you form a tree out of that?

The 2nd and 3rd lines are each replies to the 1st. The 4th is a reply
to both the 2nd and 3rd, so breaks the tree somewhat (no system is
perfect) - you have to choose between simplicity and completeness, you
could implement it as a full graph, rather than just a tree, but at
the expensive of an intuitive and elegant UI. The 5th line is a reply
to the 2nd, and the 6th is difficult to work out without knowing the
non-verbal communication that was going along at the same time, it
could be a question aimed at a specific person, or it could be a
question to the floor (which doesn't fit into the tree structure) -
the lack of non-verbal cues is why things need to be made explicit
online.

Conversations that take place in real time (particularly face-to-face,
to a lesser extent on things like IRC) don't tend to follow a tree
structure as closely as conversations with a wait before responses. In
a face-to-face conversation, you can't have two people saying
something at the same time, or someone saying something before they
are up-to-date with the whole conversation. Those things happen all
the time with email conversations, or conversations on web forums,
which is why seeing the conversation as a tree, rather than a linear
progression (which it simply isn't), is helpful.