[WikiEN-l] Durova/!! matter now in newspaper.

[Alec Conroy]

> I urge you to read 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness', which I find
> myself recommending here every few months:

I have read that, and it is thought provoking, and extremely
appropriate for Wikipedia.

> Precis: Human form hierarchies naturally.

I think a lot of the world's problems boil down to the fact that
humans don't work quite right.  We're built for the world of African
savannah, not traveling to the moon or administering an  information
superhighway.  There's still a few bugs in the system, but I wouldn't
worry-- the planet will probably be releasing a major bugfix in a
century or two.

> If you try to suppress
> hierarchies from public view, they'll form out of your sight

A most timely observation, given the recent mailing list bruhaha.
--

To come back to the task at hand--  I always wonder what wikipedia
would look like if we had the right-to-fork at the article-level
instead of the project level.  Multiple versions of articles, some
neutral, some argumentative, some simple, some complex, some verified,
some speculative.     Having "one official Wikipedia" article,  sorta
scares me-- the beauty of the internet is that you don't get just ONE
of anything, you get the ALL.

Having other wikis out there is, of course, a safeguard-- if our "one"
page becomes habitually not the best, people will instantly just go
elsewhere. But it would be cool if  could if we could somehow
incorporate that sort of safeguard right into the Wikipedia system.

On the other hand, n different forks of the article  would mean 1/n
editors per article, so it's not as if our current system doesn't seem
to be working extremely well.

Alec