Chris Cannam wrote: > William wrote: > > Whether or not a Wiki goes stale is surely a function of its > > audience rather than of the Wiki technology itself. > > Well, not entirely. My problem with wiki technology is that it doesn't > solve most of the problems I have with information management, which are > generally to do with finding things and avoiding duplication.
That seems like a straw-man argument because no current technology completely solves those two problems of information management, the root cause of which being that information is truly understandable only to human beings. > Or rather, any solutions to these problems are dependent on very heavy > usership to be practical (i.e. the principle that the organisation of the > wiki evolves towards ideal as a consequence of many minor changes). A Wiki is just a website which shares most of the management of the information contained in its pages among its readers. It is the embodiment of open-source information management. Whether or not such distributed information-management actually achieves a high-quality result has very little if anything to do with the Wiki technology itself and much to do with the goodwill, the skills, and the amount of spare time possessed by the people managing the information. >> As an example of a healthy Wiki, the Wikipedia www.wikipedia.org is an >> excellent encyclopedia which is used regularly by thousands of "real" people > > Yes, but that's the "fallacy of atypical example". Do you know what the fallacy of converse accident (this is the correct philosophical term) means? I assume you're not being knowingly specious. It refers to inappropriate use of inductive reasoning to obtain a generalisation from one or more atypical instances. I mentioned Wikipedia to give an example of a good Wiki, not to argue that Wikis are generally good. I did not say or imply that most Wikis are good. Without a generalisation there is no fallacy. Don't forget you said, "I've never seen a good one". Hence I gave an example. > Wikipedia is successful because it's the biggest and most popular instance > on the Web of something that translates pretty immediately into wiki terms > (note that an encyclopaedia is already structurally very much like a wiki, > the wiki just adds links and the "open-source" part). I don't think it is useful to try explaining differential success by looking for structural similarity between the representation of the information and the information itself. I think the high-quality of Wikipedia is best explained by other factors: (1) There was a strong unmet global need for an easily accessible encyclopedia. (2) People generally enjoy making positive contributions for global benefit. (3) The cost to contributors of making contributions is low. (4) Peer review tends to reward and attract skillful contributors. In the end it is the quality of the authors' contributions and not any property of Wiki technology that determines the value of the information in a Wiki. By the way, a Wiki doesn't "add links"; Wikis use HTML which already has links. > It's pretty much guaranteed to be a > great success so long as enough well-meaning people participate. I think factors (1) - (4) are all necessary to explain Wikipedia's success. > Yet if I were to start another wiki encyclopaedia now, it would fail, because > there is already Wikipedia. The success of Wikipedia says very little for > or against the success of wikis in general, just as the success of Google > says very little about the commercial viability of other websites. I'm not saying that Wikis are generally good but that Wikis can be good. >> I wrote a very short page on Rosegarden at the Alsa Wiki >> http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=rosegarden It's still waiting to be >> improved and extended. > > Isn't that, then, in theory an example against wikis? > You could have posted a webpage with exactly the same result. The possibility of somebody else editing that Wiki page still exists. The fact that nobody else has yet edited it does not void the benefit of it being a Wiki page. Putting it on the ALSA Wiki was logical because that is a very popular source of information about ALSA. > A wiki may be a decent way to put our existing documentation online, that's > true. After all, we _haven't_ posted a webpage with it anyway. But the > question is how far this stuff actually wants to be online? Is it a good > thing to make some of our text files that are frankly now so out-of-date as > to be misleading more readily available? It would help avoid confusion if the out-dated bits of information were clearly labelled as such, e.g. "applicable only to RG version X at date Y". I think a Rosegarden Wiki could work well for both users and developers if the RG developers were to make contributions now and then. William ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by OSTG. Have you noticed the changes on Linux.com, ITManagersJournal and NewsForge in the past few weeks? Now, one more big change to announce. We are now OSTG- Open Source Technology Group. Come see the changes on the new OSTG site. www.ostg.com _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
