Various essays, ideas for essays, and links to same. See also User:Sj/klog. Some parts moved from user:sj/essay.
General notices
- wikimania (for 2006)
older essays
Transparent sphere
23:16, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
To further the capacity and knowledge of those who seek understanding, those who gather and refine require suitable tools. Transparent tools for sharing, assessing, trying new things. Transparent privacy and security, transparent organization and process, transparent process for balancing priority and sharing resources.
To begin with, transparent tools for correspondence, research, art.
And what here is a tool? A thing of craft, artfully designed, with gross form and function, detailed interfaces and features.
Then there are transparent norms for collaboration, critique, and development.
And there are transparent spaces for living, building, and sharing.
All of these need to be formed, explored and improved. Movements and maxims need to be tested and polished. The purest strengths and efficiencies should be compounded, that deep discoveries can be distinguished from anomalies. And above all, dedication to these causes, and the pursuit of efficiency, scale, and unity through transparency, should be recognized for its contribution to society if not for immediate gains for productivity.
[wiki] philosophy
There is a pressing need for large-scale sites that support low-hierarchy networks of trust, in which people who share an interest in some activity or process or result can work together towards shared goals and develop skills over time. As they learn about the intricacies of a complex task, these groups need a simple way for more experienced and trusted community members to take on mentoring and reviewing roles in the community, refining its workflow. All of this secure in the knowledge that everyone in the community has always been welcome to improve almost any aspect of it -- its contents, its process, and its goals.
This kind of facilitation -- via website or otherwise -- can mould masses of inexperienced but dedicated people into networks of creators who together can write excellent books, translate the world's babel,develop erudite and tremendous encyclopedias, produce brilliant art and photography, build pyramids, and develop new scientific frameworks.
The original wikis were bound up in wiki philosophy, something with roots in older groups and dialects of sharing, but which Ward Cunningham has managed to evoke very steadily over the years, without entangling the core philosophies and memes with his own ego. Wikipedia when it began was almost identical with Nupedia -- the same founding team, the same group of internationally interested volunteers -- but it had an added sense of agency, the capacity for anyone to come in and tweak any and every part of the system, from bottom to top, and this wiki quality of both philosophy and implementation. t also quickly attracted a core group of people who loved the idea of wiki more than the idea of a free encyclopedia, but weree game to try this new target for their social and intellectual endeavours.
Wikis are reasonably good at supporting ease of participation -- they naturally encourage free manipulation of most of one's environment. They would be better if their limitations were fewer... if it were possible to reach into a page and manipulate its style and ambiance as easily as you can manipulate its text... if history and revision information floated up to the normal display of a page rather than being hidden behind a tab. These things will come in time. And other wildly-manipulable environment such as Second Life will come into being and find their uses.
Some essays that deserve to be written:
== design ideas == == coordination thoughts ==
Vandalism's silver lining
To the extent that vandalism highlights the fact that anyone can edit any part of Wikipedia at any time, and keeps the community from taking itself too seriously, it is like actively encouraging people to find bugs in one's software -- it tries to maintain reasonable expectations and levels of effort.
Many closed-door productions are, in contrast, able to splash a veneer of formality and style onto their results by adding the names of a few luminaries to an advisory board and improving the quality of the paper used in the print run. Vandalism, like anonymous editing, is useful for its bold, insistent repetition of the mantra of openness.
Barriers to editing
Reduce barriers to editing, increase barriers to vandalism
Reduce barriers to editing. Add WYSIWYG options, add one-click comemnts/feedback, make section-editing more obvious and more friendly. Reduce the number of warning messages, many of which scare people away. Reduce the average time to edit from ~1 minute to ~15 seconds.
Increase barriers to vandalism. Add speed-bumps for external URLs, for new content from unknown users with vandal-beloved keywords, add delays between content addition and publication to anonymous readers (99% of readers], add delays-until-verified for users who don't meet a very-low trust bar [no edit history, no edit summary, unknown/historically troublesome IP block, &c]. But don't block any of these users from saving their edits and having them seen by themselves when they revisit the page and by other editors. Make this review process transparent to all.
Protection is a hack
Protection is a hack. When it was first implemented in early 2003, it was noted as such; from the start, there has been the idea of improving on protection by "reduc[ing] the requirements for sysop intervention for useful things to happen". http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:List_of_protected_pages&oldid=787186
Wikis are designed to be editable; the ideal wiki is as open to incoming content as possible -- a metric of a wikis success at wiki-nature might be how long it takes first-time contributors to make typical edits, and how long it takes them to get/see feedback.
"Open to incoming content" isn't the same as "open to changes in what everyone else sees as outgoing content". We should strive to increase our openness to inboud content, even as we tighten quality controls on outbound content. Articles for Creation is an even worse hack than protection, and regularly fails silently and completely [the user never comes back, or thinks their work is lost; their work *is* lost].
Semi-protection is also a hack. One way to make these protection hacks work more effectively is to recognize that they are *not* the desired solution, but a quick way to implement something close. Protection is a 'reasonable' hack because anyone can still edit the talk page, leave comments for page-contributors on *their* talk pages, &c. New editors don't know any of this. Old editors and vandals don't need to be told what protection's all about.
Suggestions for improving these hacks through more information :
- make protection templates very short and inobtrusive; not in the header, to maintain a clean interface : most readers don't need to know about them (an NPOV or Disputed template can be placed there if needed, that's separate. If an article's being protected just b/c it was on slashdot, that's different).
- keep the "edit" button for protected pages. add a little icon in that tab if needed, to denote the protected nature. Offer a message on editing, varying by protection type, explaining briefly why the protection, and where to post edits and suggestions (the talk page), with a link to a longer explanation of who can edit where, how to request unprotection, how to ask for help, &c.
- update the "this page is protected from editing" message one gets when viewing the source of a protected page. make it friendlier, again linking to where one *can* suggest changes and explaining this in postive rather than negative terms.
- make it more clear than it is now who applied protection when, and what their protection-summary was. pull this information into the notices listed above.
Essays by others
/Wikipedia Humor and /Consistent or Complete, by the departed User:QTJ.
/Suggested improvements by Werdna.