On the CommunityWiki, we ask ourselves, “How do we want to talk? What’s our conversation process?” With those questions come other questions: “What do we want in DocumentMode? How do we ensure reworking?”
This wiki includes wiki itself as a subject, and we experiment with conversational forms on this wiki. Our answers to the questions on this page are by no means settled.
What kinds of things would we like in the DocumentMode? Please feel free to tell us about what things you think are important.
For theory pages (as in TheoryBuilding):
For conversations:
In general:
“How do we determine LinkLanguage? Should we have a formal process?”
The choice of names is not unimportant; “This is the word that you’ll use to refer to this idea.” It doesn’t take long to change a page, but it can take a while to change LinkLanguage. That said, we have redirects and page aliases to help balance things out.
Our choice of LinkLanguage is usually non-controversial. A long page often develops named section headings, which then export to full pages. Or a page begins with a name such as “WhatIsFoo,” “FooArchived,” or “FooDiscussion.”
ImportanceOfIdentityInOnlineCommunities, is an inspiring example; Note that most of the resulting smaller pages linked to in the “issues” section have good and valuable names.
There was a debate in SourceOfEthics about whether to call it SourceOfEthics, or NaturalisticSourceOfEthics, or LionOnTheSourceOfEthics?, and so on. Conversation settled on NaturalisticSourceOfEthics. We have not had any situations wherein it was difficult to determine what to do, after talking.
For the most part, CommunityWiki, (and several other Communalwiki,) have used what we’ll call the TraditionalConversationProcess, which goes something like this:
However, we haven’t been entirely happy with this; We’ve observed the LackOfReworking, for instance, or that we can veer OffTopic, and feel like we haven’t accomplished something. The questions above reflect some of the things we’ve wondered about. There are likely other questions, that just haven’t surfaced yet.
LionKimbro started some momentum around a DesignatedMaintainerProcess, the idea that people could become “PageMaintainer” for a page, and the designated page maintainer would tend the conversation, and the DocumentMode, to ensure that positive things come out.
There are likely many more forms, which we would like to understand and to explore.
The “WikiWay” deserves special note.
People say its a good idea, and that it works great. But nobody seems to be able to express what it is. It’s plausibly more than just a ParadoxOfExpression, (a reality that cannot be expressed,) though, because people who claim to be attuned to it don’t always agree with one another on the application of the mystery to a situation.
PageMaintainer: LionKimbro. Incorporates conversations with ZbigniewLukasiak, HansWobbe, and AlexSchroeder.
conversation dialog history communitywiki
.OK, I’ve worked in Alex’s ideas.
The super-question is: What containers would we like for our conversations here?
Sub-questions are listed above, and another question is, as always: “What are some other good questions?”
Define external redirect: SignPost LionOnTheSourceOfEthics