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For internal stuff, we have this blog of ours: It collects DatePages. Add a new date page now! See TimeInWikis.
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We may want to change the mode of CommunityWiki conversation.
Historically, we have operated in some pretty regular long-term conversations, punctuated by short or middle-length silences.
Now it seems we are more long-term in our silences, and short-term in our conversations.
Yet I am coming to think, this is okay.
To adapt to the new mode, I would propose that the CommunityWikiBylaws be amended to change the text from:
…to:
…if not 2 delegation for 2 years, removal after 8 years.
More casually (and more importantly,) I suggest the following questions (roughly) to help ourselves connect after we have been away for a time:
Whatever you have to say, please share.
I suspect that we may connect with each other every now and then, as we feel called, and then share what is going on for us, and whoever is available in whatever capacity, can share in the conversation that forms.
This is a “low frequency resonance,” (resonance being a subject invoked previously by HelmutLeitner,) but I don’t think a low-resonance frequency is “worse” than high-frequency conversation, or anything like that.
Thoughts?
I like the idea!
Low frequency is just the way it is, and that’s ok. In a way I’m in MissionAccomplished mode. The communities I wanted to create I have created (mostly Emacs Wiki and #emacs), I’ve found a work-life-balance that I’m getting used to. Perhaps it’s also an age thing. Settling down, cultivating my own garden à la Voltaire.
I haven’t found any community problems that I couldn’t solve with the processes we’ve discussed on this wiki and on Meatball. Weirdos calling my cell phone, difficult people that needed to be banned on IRC, conversations I’ve had with them and other operators, all of that was never new and exciting enough to prompt a post on Community Wiki.
I’ll write more on my namepage…
I, too, like the idea.
Personally, I’ve noticed that many of us are active on the “streaming” sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn? and this seems to provide a bit of a RecentChanges and RecentNews? effect. There is, however, also a need for an environment in which folks can collaborate in building larger pages (essays?) and I, personally, still find wiki technologies and their user communities a more productive way working on these.
I’m also finding it interesting to see how “social” web services are evolving. One way I’ve been trying to evaluate them is by posting an article a day at the “Amplify” site. … to be continued on my namepage.
Maybe we need to return to using the BannedContent page?
I have published my essay on on-line conflicts and the mimetic theory a the p2p blog.
I noticed that we somehow managed to set up an infinite loop using LocalNames. When I follow the link to MeatballWiki, I end up in an infinite loop.
At first I thought the problem was NearLinks. Checking the near links defined I found that MeatballWiki ought to point to MeatballWiki:MeatballWiki. Looking back at 2009-08-28 I found that the title attribute for the link says CommunityLocalNames.
Looking at the definition of local names, I see no link that defines a local name for MeatballWiki. Therefore the problem must be the import of local names. And indeed, the list of local names defined shows that the name MeatballWiki does in fact point to our own page, which doesn’t exist, which falls back on the local name, which redirects the browser to our own page, which doesn’t exist, which falls back on the local name, which redirects the browser to our own page, …
Fixing this is problematic, since I need to prove we’re going in circles by following the chain. An easier solution would be to simplify our setup – importing less namespaces in particular, or none at all if possible.
I propose we get rid of these namespaces:








Who needs them?
They’re either dead, or contain the infinte loop I’m referring to.
And actually, I don’t promote LocalNames in that style any more; That’s the thought about how to do it.
The “modern definition” of a “Local Names Namespace Description” is simply hyperlinks on a page.
Basically, you download an HTML page, and read off all the A HREF links, with the key being the linked text, and the value being the URL linked to, – and that is your namespace description.
Thus, every wiki’s PageIndex is automatically a local names namespace description, assuming they follow the usual practice of linking each pagename in the index.
See LocalNames for more information.
MeatballWiki has been active, and is presently refocusing on mission, which SunirShah is clarifying.
HelmutLeitner & I and JamBaltine were having a detailed conversation, and we think it’s appropriate to relocate it. The question was asked, “Where should we relocate to?” I suggested CW as a possibility.
Traditionally, we have talked about things such as wiki notekeeping organization, the nature of reason & rationality, programming, logistics, the “hive mind,” and various other things.
Increasingly, my inner compass pointed me towards TeilhardDeChardin, the ImagiReal?, the spiritual, teleology, and so on. I made a judgment (perhaps erroneous) not to talk about such things on CW, because those are things that the CW community “didn’t sign up for,” so to speak. I think the furthest it ever got was with the FiveWorldsMandala.
This message is just a feeler to see how y’all feel about my breaching into those territories here; The conversation on MeatballWiki:SocialAutonomy certainly does, especially at the point we reach near the end.
Subjects talked about (and some links to related pointers) include:
The conversation has already demonstrated heightened emotion.
I’m requesting the judgement of everyone, but especially AlexSchroeder.
Also, if anyone has recommendations for ground rules for such conversation, I’d love to hear those as well.
You know that I am a slow mover, a conservative and sceptical person who suspects WordMagic everywhere. In addition to that, I basically told Friedemar to leave a few years ago and I hesitate to welcome anything that will bring him back in.
Despite my resentful nature, however, I cannot help but notice that dedicating this site to all things wiki is to know more and more about less and less until we know everything about nothing. If we don’t want to FishBowl this wiki, we need to figure out what topics it affords, what topics interest us. On an intellectual level I can see how in the early days of wiki it was seen as ground-breaking not only in how technical manuals and FAQ collections were written and maintained, but in how manuals were written, in how complex ideas were often better expressed as a PatternLanguage, how wikis might change traditional hierarchies and values, how wikis afforded a different way of organizing people in an information society.
And so I find myself intrigued after all.
Now let me head over to Meatball Wiki and read up on what has been going on over there. 
Edit: Hm… So much activity. I don’t know where to start!
I’d note the bottom of MeatballWiki:SunirShah, and for what I was talking about, MeatballWiki:SocialAutonomy.
The basis behind the “word magic” of saying that a person is universe is comparable (in English, at least,) to saying “That is pie,” given a slice of pie, or “That is clay,” given a piece of clay.
What’s at work in these examples is that “clay” or (to a degree) “pie” is a substance, a holographic whole. It doesn’t matter if one has just a piece of clay, or 10 tons of clay; We just call it “clay,” in order to refer to the coherence, or the self-similarity of it all.
So when I say “the person is Universe,” I am treating the universe (and the person) like clay. I am saying, “The person is the same fundamental substance as universe.”
I argue that it is more “correct,” on grounds of scientific monism (“There is one thing, the universe,”) rather than, say, dualism (“There are souls&minds, and there is stuff.”) Scientists should feel compelled by the monism, rather than resistant. I am not saying that a rock is as intelligent as you, but I am saying that intelligence and consciousness are modes of universal substance. I may be wrong about this (perhaps consciousness really is different,) but I will not be wrong because my science is mistaken.
What are the consequences of this?
They’re actually pretty far reaching. With an ethos of participation, we rightly include ourselves in the history of the universe. When the universe is all that is dead and inert, evolution ends with the BioSphere?. But by this model, evolution extends into the NooSphere. Furthermore, the human soul (or) the human heart is understood to be a natural phenomenon. Human imagination becomes a crucial actor in the drama of the universe.
When we’re just a “part” of the universe, our idea is that we’re something like an appendix. The real story of the universe is rocks floating about. There’s not much for us to do, and there’s no real point to doing anything. But when the universe itself has a soul, (and it does, factually speaking, at least in proportion to the degree that we have souls,) then we see that the universe is on an adventure of the imagination, and that the human heart is the bedrock of reality. Life is animated with every quark and atom in existence. We know that molecules feel, to some degree, in some way, some how, because we do.
I’m going to relocate the prior text.
Here’s the key passage:
Agreed.
Revisiting the MissionStatement may be a good idea, or perhaps making explicit some CommunityWikiThemes, or perhaps even just inviting people to write about what they’re thinking about, all in one gigantic mess, to see what themes emerge.
I wonder how all the spam gets through. This doesn’t happen on my other sites. Any ideas? I will start playing with the Question Asker setup and might switch to ReCaptcha if that doesn’t work.
I would think they just have someone answering a question here and there, manually. I have seen what appear to be clearly custom crafted non-repeated topical comments on message boards before, that were used to deliver spam messages.
I’m not sure how it gets through, but I have a nagging suspicion that its a more sophisticated attack than we are used to seeing.
I’m not sure wether we’re loosing data or not. I can see that PatrickAnderson had 160 edits with the two last edits before the spam hit him (and restarted revisions from 1) being 2007-09-18 17:59:39 UTC with summary “cleanup, add many discussion wishes” from an afcity.net host followed by a minor edit with no summary on 2007-09-25 13:41:38 UTC from the same host. Whether that last edit was a deletion of the page or not, I cannot tell. The only copies available from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine are from 2006.
I did find an old tarball from 2008-04-21. It does not contain a page PatrickAnderson. I therefore conclude that somebody – possibly Patrick Anderson himself – delete the page in 2007 and we did not loose any data.
Hmm – I can believe that PatrickAnderson might have erased his page, but – CommunityWikiBusiness?? CommunityWikiNamingPolicy??
From the same tarball:
alex@mirabel:~/communitywiki.org$ tar tzf community.tar.gz | grep CommunityWikiBusiness
communitywiki.org/referer/C/CommunityWikiBusiness.rf
communitywiki.org/keep/C/CommunityWikiBusinessDiscussion/
communitywiki.org/page/C/CommunityWikiBusinessDiscussion.pgThere is no CommunityWikiBusiness? page, although there are referrers pointing to the page.
Checking the old rc.log file I find 37 log entries matching CommunityWikiBusiness?, but not a single one being for the CommunityWikiBusiness? itself.
alex@mirabel:~/communitywiki.org$ egrep 'CommunityWikiBusiness' oldrc.log | cut -d `echo -e "\0036"` -f 2 | sort | uniq
CommunityRepository
CommunityWikiBank
CommunityWikiBusinessDiscussion
CwbHwoToDoThus, I remain confident that no data was lost.
By the way, I myself have bookmarked the following link:
http://www.communitywiki.org/en?action=rc;days=7;all=0;showedit=1;css=;theme=;lang=;rollback=1
Maybe you prefer a RSS feed?
http://www.communitywiki.org/en?action=rss;days=7;all=0;showedit=1;lang=;rollback=1
Alex,
Thank you for reassuring us that there was no loss of data.
While this site is not receiving a lot of edits lately, it is in my opinion a valuable accumulation of information that I would hate to see damaged!
Agreed.
Alex – where can we download the page database now?
There was a link on the front page, to: http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/list-archive
…but I don’t see CW in there.
We haven’t made many edits, so it seems like a good time for backing up on our respective computers.
I think DanielMacKay has a backup of the site.
Oh, wait – the page CommunityWikiBackup has a system that work. DL’ing.
55 MB tar’ed and zipped. Wow!
Actually I’ll change that to point to an rsync archive to save bandwidth. I’ve been planning to do that for the longest time. Then I can keep a tarball every year or month as a snapshot just in case.
I don’t know enough about the ‘nix world, so all I can do quickly is ask if “rsync” would make it possible to effectively mirror this site to another host?
This is exactly what it does. Except that the backup host is not set up as a webhost and therefore doesn’t know what to do with the backup. The idea is to enable other people to resurrect or fork (RightToFork) this wiki, not to setup a fallback system.
(Will set up an rsync on my server too)
Lion,
I think “wiki” is pretty done, as far as a movement goes.
Wiki as SenseMaking device isn’t even on the radar, as far as public understanding is concerned; If you try to explain it to people, you just get blank stares.
I wish WikiEngine developers focused on: “What is my wiki for?”
Possible answers:
I think you could make more efficient document store/edit/retrieval systems, if you said, “This is what it is, this is what it is about. SenseMaking is not what this is about.”
If we are clear that SenseMaking is what a WikiEngine is about, then I suspect that there are ways to direct a given WikiEngine more explicitely around SenseMaking.
If it’s for collaboratively making documentation for software, or for collecting tutorials and such, I think there’s things you could do for that. For example, translations support (and progress metering of said) becomes much, much, much more important.
Seems like it is now merging into the fabric of the way people use applications online in general. Google Docs, Opera Unite, etc etc etc. There are lots of co-editable or even rea-time co-editable document apps floating around out there now.
SenseMaking in wiki actually is very time consuming, and I have fallen from grace and started using stuff like http://socialsynergyweb.org/culturing/ and am working on ways to merge the objects that go into a system like http://socialsynergyweb.org/culturing/ together into a page, then publish that way.
The pattern in CommunityWiki for SenseMaking (and TheoryBuilding ) is still awesome and valuable to me, but we are club, and it’s tough to get others to join
(most of them get lost, though not all)
I agree with you about MediaWiki etc not being the greatest document storage retrieval system. I think many start to use it because others who also don’t know suggest that they do. OpenMeta? http://code.google.com/p/openmeta/ is a better example of DocumentStorageRetrievalSystem?, in my opinion, and some of the things you can do with Zotero also are related. Many organizations are not yet ready to distribute document and archives management. And so, perhaps wiki makes it still seem “manageable” yet collaborative at the same time, in their eyes?
Agreed: It is expensive. It is basically: “the editing and publishing business.”
Further, we are not only a club, but also: a ConLang?.
I saw recently on twitter, someone in the wiki world (I forget who!) saying, “The vision of wiki as a sense-making vehicle has basically been lost.” I think this conversation originated in the BlueOxen community.
They’re right. So what happens now?
In my mind, I’ve started to connect wiki SenseMaking with ConLang?, and what KennethBurke? called, “the TerministicScreen?.” We’re much more about language construction than we are about software.
Language construction is the “resonant frequency” of wiki.
The problem is that most people just aren’t very interested in language construction.
The thing to do then, I would think, is to approach people who are about language construction, and share wiki with them.
My thought is to refocus the conversation from software to language construction, and use a wiki to do so.
Interesting Lion the idea that wiki is more about ConLang? than anything else. Although it does appear that most people are not currently interested in ConLang?, as a “futurist”, one question that surfaces in my mind is: “will most people eventually be interested in this?”
I think there is a chance that this could happen, that as more people do more “things” with text in networks, as more data that is findable via MetaData is stored in and accessible via networks, that ConLang? will re-emerge as a vital basic operating need.
But, I think in many cases, that the co-contruction of language will end up being compressed and then sybmolized. So that simple words are symbols, or symbols themselves are employed. Care co-construction of language takes too much time for most people. Plus, co-construction is rejected outright still by many institutions. People who could probably uptake the easiest, and benefit the most, plus sustain, are networks of independents. If they understand the value, I believe they would uptake. I think it is possible to do anywhere, not just within wiki, now. (provided there is a way to pull together those items that are part of a network of discussions).
I mention our discussion here, in this facebook discussion.
Risto mentions a book http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5050.html which may shed some serious light on ConLang? approaches. Or, at least could provide some newer background.
See this review http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/thagard.html