[WikiEN-l] A modest proposal - a recap of resolution-l

[stevertigo]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 10:31 AM, Gwern Branwen<gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Email lists have the attention span of ferrets on crack; if we're
> looking for long-term discussions, MLs are the worst model we could
> pick, which is another strike against this proposal.

And yet you write to one or more regularly, and while your name itself
may not be cited, your term "ferrets on crack" will no doubt be reused
here until the end of wiki-time.

> Ironically, wikis are so far the online medium which have done best at
> long-term conversations: I routinely see talk page conversations where
> the gaps between one message and another may be a year or three. This
> is not something I've ever been able to say of email lists, IRC chat,
> IM, newsgroups, social sites, web aggregators, most every blog...

Keep in mind that "wiki" is just a format, with all the backend
required, for editing documents online. It's fast becoming as
ubiquitous as paper someday will once have been, and thus our entire
project is sort of stuck with a name that in a few years will have the
same sense of distinction as 'paperpedia,' or 'pulpedia'.

Anyway, back to the point, wikis are great for documents - not
conversations. There are of course ideas out there now for ways to
make wiki pages more liquid and perhaps even making its individual
elements atomic and rankable - such as to be suitable for discussions.
And there are also ideas about making traditionally non-wiki concepts
like email more openly editable - waves comes to mind, along with
other CMSes that integrate wiki. 'Someday all websites will be wiki?'
- Sure, but when that happens we won't need to to call them wikis
anymore.

-Stevertigo