[Foundation-l] Google Wave and Wikimedia projects

Sat May 30 13:06:27 UTC 2009

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 8:26 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> I hated the way it didn't seem to
> indicate what message you were replying to. For the most part, the
> conversation had a linear structure, not a tree one. They would reply
> to the last message in the conversation and the reply would have the
> same indentation as all the rest of the messages. To me, that makes it
> look like a reply to the original message that started the wave.

Heh, that's actually one of the memes in Wikipedia (etc.) talk pages that I
never liked.  Too geeky.

Maybe they could do something with color coding...  I dunno, I've found
Wikipedia Review standard mode to be the best.  If you're changing the
topic, start a new thread.  If it's really important that you're replying to
something, quote it.

I guess it goes back to the "discussion vs. collaboration" argument.  If the
purpose is discussion for the sake of the active participants, tree
structures are extraneous.  If the purpose is creating a collaborative
document for third parties to view later, I think you've gotta go to
"Document Mode".  There's probably a lot of improvement that can be made to
each, but I seriously doubt that Google is going about it correctly.

I like the concept of DoubleWiki (
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?DoubleWiki), but that never really
caught on.

The ability to use colors will surely be helpful.