“LinkLanguage” is the language formed by familiar links.
Have you ever seen a page change drastically? One that people linked to a lot?
Have you ever wanted to link to something, but been a little nervous about doing so, because it might change?
“TrustedLinkLanguage” is link language that people trust linking to, because they know it won’t change on them (“ContentSwizzling.”)
I reworked a page on Ward’s Wiki, Wiki:OffTopic, which I was proud of. I liked what it said, and I link to it a lot, because it means particular things. In particular, it includes notes on how some OffTopic is actually helpful and necessary, because people need to be able to bond, in order to work together. I felt that the argument resulted in good understanding.
However, Ward’s Wiki is a chaotic place. Someone may double-delete the page (link to the better name for this?), rendering my links useless. I hesitate to link Wiki:OffTopic.
Notice how InterWiki communities compound the problem- the person who is linking may have some distance from the community that is maintaining the linked wiki. That means that the person is less likely to trust that the LinkLanguage is valid.
I believe that in order to build TrustedLinkLanguage, a mature community around some topic should build an accompanying ManagedWiki, or perhaps even static pages. This can be considered a sort of “Semantic Infrastructure” effort for ThePublicWeb.
However, I think the static pages should be modifiable. If they aren’t modifiable, then we are stuck in a particular era. Obviously, static pages can’t be modified in place. But- there should be some sort of automated way of accessing the pages, the automation guarded by a community of people. Technology to do this may involve WikiFeatures:TemperedPages (see WikiFeatures:IdeasToPlace #118.) The static pages would include links to freely editable versions of pages, likely in a ScratchWiki mirror, or in a CommunalWiki. You could probably also automatically copy the page to another wiki, or download it to your hard drive.
This effort to build ManagedWiki or static pages would be part of the PublicRefineryProcess. I imagine that the static pages to come out of a process would be well respected, and frequently linked and visited.
Refining pages, and maintaining TrustedLinkLanguage would likely be a SuperordinateGoal of a subset of an online community.
When building new extensions to FOAF, for example, we see a similar thing happening: They want to make an extension to describe pets. Now, how do we know your dog is a dog? They will use a tag to describe the species of the dog, and the rag will be linked to WordNet. In fact, the links to WordNet provide us with a “link language” for ordinary things – it turns our usual vocabulary into a static, slow-changing, linkable vocabulary.
I’ve moved this page out of LinkLanguage. It needs serious reworking.
Yes, I’d like to have us avoid some of the fallacies about language, such as the WordNet idea described above. This will take some work to both describe and avoid, especially since this kind of thing is very common…
It is becomming apparent that there is a great deal more to TrustedLinkLanguage than just knowing and appreciating the concepts documented in the linked material. As more “web services” applications emerge, the approach of passing arguments to the processor that allow it to perform a specialized function and return a TrustedResult? will become more prevalent. This is likely to cause a real ParadigmShift in the way we think about computation and communication.
This is even more problematic in the case of Wikipedia - it’s true that you can always view the history, but if you make a point and you want to support it with Wikipedia and your adversary just see that and goes there and subtly changes the page then it can create so much chaos. I see it as inevitable that at some points we shall start to link to specific versions of the pages and only from there let people to go to the current page.