[Foundation-l] New Proposal: WikiMemory

Mon Sep 19 21:38:49 UTC 2005

Robin Shannon asked:
> 4. Why a Wiki (or, To edit or not to edit)?

And I agree that this is the important question.

Marshall Poe answered:

> To me, this is the most interesting question of all because it 
> points up a conflict between two principles.  On the one hand, 
> we want to be open and allow everyone to edit all content.  On 
> the other hand, we want to gather and disseminate the sum of 
> human knowledge to everyone, free.

In mathematical terminology, the sum (e.g. "7") is not the same 
thing as its terms (e.g. "3 + 4").  The sum can be computed from 
the terms, but once you have the sum you can no longer determine 
which the terms were.  I think that Wikipedia, using wikis, should 
disseminate the *sum* of human knowledge, because one person could 
enter 3 and another could add 4 to it, resulting in the sum. But 
this new proposed memoir project instead aims to present the 
individual components or terms, each on their own.  Other tools 
than wikis, such as blogs, are better suited for that task.

There are plenty of technical tools out there for people who want 
to set up their own blog, to report their individual memoirs.  
There are also tools that help coordinate blogging on a larger 
scale, such as del.icio.us for tagging, flickr for adding photos, 
geobloggers.com for adding geographic coordinates, and most 
recently the Google Blogsearch.

Wikipedia is also such a tool, as it allows bloggers to link to 
encyclopedic articles that provide background knowledge on places, 
people, and events.  The occurance of such links is indeed a kind 
of tagging.  You can do a Google blogsearch to find 8 known blog 
entries that link to the article [[en:Great Chicago Fire]], 
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FGreat_Chicago_Fire
which is 8 times more than you'll find through
http://del.icio.us/tag/ChicagoFire

Some future incarnation of Wiktionary could also become such a 
useful resource, but it isn't really there yet.

> but the Wikisource *edition* of the “Magna Carta” will only 
> become less valuable as it is edited further away from its 
> original, canonical state (the words as they were written in 
> 1215).

Quite correctly, this is a weakness of Wikisource as it is now 
conceived, and hardly a valid argument for using wikis for 
memoirs.

> Which is the superior principle?  I’d say it’s the 
> all-human-knowledge principle.

Nothing says one tool has to be useful for all situations.

-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se