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WikiFromScratchDiscussion

Discussion for WikiFromScratch

i like this start; let me see if i can be one of the writing persons: this means i expect to come back and read what a responding person has written; it means also that i am already concerned about the growth of this page and about its readability .. see what i’m trying to hint at?

I have trouble separating the technical problems from the political. For this embryo to reach foetus we will probably need to be able to adjust the MarkupSyntax?. It could be some kind of kludge that says:

//pseudocode:
if we are processing the pagename "WikiFromScratch",
then pull the MarkupSyntax from the file "WikiFromScratch.MarkupSyntax"

Then we could create a file called “WikiFromScratch.MarkupSyntax?” and fill it with mappings like:

;; this is EmacsLisp
;;XML entities
("<" "&lt;")
("&" "&amp;")

;; whitespace
("[\n]" " <br/>\n")
("\t" "&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;") ;;TAB
("  " " &nbsp;") ;; two spaces
("^ " "&nbsp;")

On the other hand, it may be better to isolate this kind of chicanery to a startup over at http://communitywiki.org/odd

@ luigi: my vision is: each newbie is the center of a circle of 4 - 8 veterans, which concentrate to him, till he is ready to concentrate to the next newbie .

@ patrick: a startup over at http://communitywiki.org/odd is not a good idea, because this wikis are small stripes in the middle of the screen and to the right and to the left there is nothing (black stripes) . that’s programmers play, but not for users .

@ sigi: does the 4 - 8 veteran group include someone who would be interested in letting a newbie explore and expand a draft definition of her/his own objective for using a wiki, without any understanding nor concern for the technical issues?

sigi: are you talking about the visual layout of the page? That can be changed through the stylesheet (the css). See http://communitywiki.org/odd/DenisRevin/FrontPage for instance.

But maybe my suggestion is not important for your goals here. What are some of the questions you are referring to?

I’d be with it on running a wiki together.

@ luigi: yes, it does . at least you and me, i think . as you can see in my talk with patrick, i’m not this technique-freak . but i love good structures, as roads to good goals .

@ patrick: thanks for the correction . my goals? you wrote: “i spend most of my time trying to understand why physical world policy is failing to meet the needs of most of the world’s population”.. . so do i . wiki is a virtual world, but the population of this world is real . so, the society, we build in this world, is real too . i think, we need a society made by persons, not by property . i think, that future is a dream and we are the makers of it .

@ mattis: kanst du Ainfac Doitz entzprecend obigem per css endern?

Mattis: Maybe we could form an LLP that would purchase the base hosting fees collectively, with the extended bandwidth fees being applied individually. Anonymous and non-paying users would have a bandwidth caps to keep costs covered. The most Free as in Freedom host I’ve seen is http://epfarms.net

Eggplant Farms represents a group of people dedicated to educating and empowering one another to use the Internet to express ideas, and to driving down the cost of Internet communication to the lowest point possible.

Collective ownership is more important as a dispersal of the true voting sovereignty of each member than to cover the very small initial costs.

sigi: Humans require property to exist. I just found http://Cultivation.sf.net yesterday. It is a beautiful simulation of this economic truth.

@sigi: the type of structure i’m aiming for is more relational than physical, and it should emerge from an objective sharing action; this generic statement is my starting point; to take off from such a simple run away the only power i can consider is widely available web2 stuff such as Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets; later, after take off … it might be possible to replace … (i’m looking for words) … the stuff my relational structure is made of … ???

@patrick: i have looked at epfarms and Cultivation; the first one makes me feel i might be ready to consider it … after “take off” (meaning: my relational structure is shaping up and i can count the parties forming it); the second one sent me away because i dont understand “openGL” and i’m too lazy to search around what it is … ;)

@ patrick: couldn’t open cultivation too . “humans require property to exist”: yes, perhaps since 6000 years . but what did they do the hundreds of thousend years before it .
eggplant farms: do this people want to make a wiki? then they can join us. together it’s easier to reach the critical mass .

@ luigi: i think, we don’t need commercial web2 stuff, for we can do all this better in a wiki . WikiFromScratch is our first sharing action . so, our relational structure is made of pages and persons?

While ‘property’ as currently defined may not be required, there are some ecologic and economic truths that humans cannot escape.

Humans require Sources such as:

  • Sun: for energy and health
  • Air: must be clean
  • Land: to stand, grow and store
  • Water: to drink, wash and irrigate
  • Useful Organisms: to build food, drugs, soap, cloth, shelter

If you think the Sun is invincible or the air will take care of itself, you might read the following that finally legalizes the spraying that takes place almost every day throughout much of the world:

Listen to http://freeaudio.org/fbastiat/candlemakerspetition.html to understand why this is valuable to the few.

Land (terra) is fundamental to life. There is plenty on our planet if it were used appropriately, but it is squandered by those that understand how to extract value through hoarding. You may feel free, but where can you place your foot, and under what terms? Wikis are powerful in this regard because they are one of the few places that try to offer physical resources (the electricity, land, machines and wires that host the wiki) in a truly ‘common’ manner - though there is much polish to apply to the current form of this governance.

Fortune magazine declares “Water, like air, is a necessity of human life. It is also, according to Fortune magazine, ‘One of the world’s great business opportunities. It promises to be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th.’” – http://cbc.ca/news/features/water

The Bechtel corporation has a history in Bolivia, and currently holds much of Iraq’s water rights.

http://troubledwater.org claims “The three largest water corporations will control 70 percent of the water in Europe and North America by the end of the decade.”

Most useful organisms are owned by a handful of powerful corporations because we (the workers and consumers) have not yet figured out a way to act in a collective manner that would help restore the permaculture as it (supposedly) was in Eden.

Look out your window. Do you see a single plant or animal or mushroom that could be used for food? If you found youself on an island or planet covered with such organisms could you survive? We are sitting ducks because we do not control (own) the Sources of our physical needs.

Back in the virtual world…

Building a wiki requires analogous Sources:

  • Sun: electricity
  • Air: ?
  • Land: to house the computers and wires
  • Water: maybe this is electricity?
  • Useful Organisms: computers and wires

Building a wiki requires physical Sources to store and ‘express’ the virtual contents (the text, video, etc.) of that wiki. If those Sources are controlled (owned) by just a few, then, as the community develops, there will be ever increasing pressure for the owners to act against the users for profit. One way I see to avoid this is to do as Saint IGNUcius sings [ http://gnu.org/music/free-software-song.html ] and share (as in ‘shares’ of a corporation) the Sources amongst every user that pays their sliver of rent required to keep those physical Sources up and running. This is far more important to internal stability than for the (rather insignificant at first) actual costs. It is a distribution of control

I mention http://EPFarms.net because they are a hosting company that appears to be interested in allowing “pass through” or “at cost” access to physical Sources. This is very important for us to scale and finally replace proprietary services (such as YouTube, MySpace, etc.) that unneccessarily confine user choice for the purpose of extracting profit beyond costs.

“a wiki that is truely owned and operated by every ‘member’ of the community”

Have you heard me rant about the "fault-tolerant, distributed wiki" I want to build?

One possible way for me to build such a thing is to (somehow, waves hands here) let each member of the community interested in that wiki host a few pages of the wiki on that member’s personal computer. Each person runs software that shuffles the pages around periodically. The software makes sure each page has at least 2 copies on 2 (hopefully widely-)seperated machines. (Perhaps that software is in one of the “sandboxed” languages that can send and recieve pages over the internet, but cannot read or write to the hard drive).

Since each person is (more or less) in complete control of that person’s computer, it would be impossible for any one person to seize control of the entire wiki. If that person turns off every machine he has access to, the rest of the wiki reconstructs the data in the wiki from the other backup copy.

This is scalable, because the bigger the community gets, the more machines it has to store wikipages on.

Spam, on the other hand, could be a problem. But perhaps it’s no bigger than the WikiSpam problem we already have…

(brainstorming: … distributed captcha … with a 20 machines hosting the network at once, each machine submits 1 or 2 characters of captcha, and only if all 20 machines unanimously confirm to each other that the letters typed were good, then all 20 machines accept the captcha as good … but that’s not scalable. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a human to type 1000 random characters perfectly before allowing access. Is there a better way?)

… am I drifting off the topic of “WikiFromScratch” ?

i made a first copy: http://www.bluestack.org/WikiFromScratch
it’s a little different syntax there (to write in the original you can follow the back-link) .
beyond that i made a folder in my computer with a file named WikiFromSratch (please replace this by better english).
would be easier, if the page doesn’t become too large . any idea?

This is a hell of an exiting experiment I mean. Collectively making a server with open access for others to participate and “own” it. Great ideas David, remember the fire-axe, decentralize it, agree totally. But, also as an introductive exercise, we should get a collecive server up. I pay for it for a year, who wants coontributes to the costs, all and none owns it, we agree on things, bandmenship. wikiwiki-way. Really. The cracks I’d trust and agree on to give acess to install and improve are AlexSchroeder, RadomirDopieralski, LionKimbro, mutante. It should be a wiki-hive. All the oddwikis I started can be transfered to it.

iau, das is doc n vort . ThomasKalka keme auc noc in fráge .

David: P2P website hosting is interesting. I read your proposal and found I2P.net and GNUnet.org and was reminded of MUTE-net.sf.net which just happens to be written by the author of Cultivation.sf.net mentioned above hmm…

Anyway, these are good ideas, but do not quite address what I see as the fundamental problem - that every user must have [equal in theory, but weighted by current holdings] control of the physical and virtual Sources, and that that control must come from the use of the “Objects” of those Sources. One way I see to do that is by transferring small percentages of real ownership of the hardware to users who earn or purchase the right to change or store content - but those shares are (I’ve had many ideas about how to approach this next part; here is one.) exponentially more expensive based on the number of shares that user already holds, and WRT the number of Users and the amount of hardware that is available to be divided. Some users access the internet from machines they don’t own (say a Cafe or Library), or from devices that have limited storage capacity.

The P2P idea further reminds me of the PointOfView? idea stretched to goofy idea I call ForkWiki? - where distributed version control is used to save all changes from all paying SPAMmers (just assume everyone’s data is useful or useless), and Users may act as though it were their private wiki, but changes to ‘public’ areas are only votes to change that text or code. It will probably be a mess, but maybe we could make it work - where the resulting ‘default’ view is a merge of all Users preferences that happen to coincide, or maybe a high percentage. This could be used for programming to. Imagine code hosted in this way - where you [agree], [hide] or [disagree] with changes - and any other User that “subscribes” to your view (especially non-programmers) would synchronize with your version of the program.

sigi: Moved the discussion. Could you tell me more about your personal goals for this page? What do you mean by instead there are some persons, which will try to respond to your writing?

Mattis: I pay for it for a year, At first this doesn’t matter much, but ‘automatic’ ownership distribution is vital to stability, and should be thought of as a ‘right’, not a burden.

i’ll try to say it in your words: own or be owned .
we are not free . we are controlled by gouvernance and money .
our chance to be free is a free wiki . in this we are at one .
my personal goals for this page is to learn how to act together
and not to hoard things .
so, things are of second order . people count .

@sigi:
Re: we don’t need commercial web2 stuff, for we can do all this better in a wiki . WikiFromScratch is our first sharing action . so, our relational structure is made of pages and persons?
Yes Sigi, i would welcome an opportunity to start creating a page and person structure, documenting the development and the use of a free wiki
However, in my case .. commercial stuff

  • WAS the stuff which allowed my learning process to start
  • IS the stuff which allows me to download Linux and other Open Source products
  • NEEDS TO BE the stuff by which i can try to invite less (technology) knowledgeable (Real World) parties to become involved in a new learning process, leading to things such as a free wiki
    Would you be open to finding a compromise approach to freedom .. via our everyday commercial reality or .. do you prefer to go for a revolution ;) ?

I’ve been working on oddwiki intensively since about May creating some structure for a wiki-hive. I just started on oddwiki-center: home-page draft. What should we host on our common server? Alex likes it slim on communitywiki.org, it’s perfectly alright like that. Let’s prepare to create a buffer in case the traffic on communitywiki.org with oddwikis on it increases Alex’s gusto. He shall be embraced to also have all rights and accesses to the commonly run server btw.
It’s about nothing but about making a band and to act like one.

@ luigi: interesting ideas . perhaps we could also put CommunityWikiBank on our start page .
and then your page under it: <do you have a name?>

@ sigi & mattis:

  • i keep postponing my active involvement in the work you have been starting and progressing with OddWikiCenter and CommunityWikiBank …
  • i’m still bogged down by my own attempt to present some basic ideas, which i wish could reach and motivate my own “real world” acquaintances into considering becoming involved in a Community creation experience ..
  • i wonder whether our front page could be shaped - initially - as a compilation of a number of different “visions” which our “gut feelings” sense as likely to converge towards a joint action (in other words … we should start acting as one … before we can say we are a band)
  • i do not expect to have a name … before i manage to get some feedback from the type of people my present endeavour is addressed to … :)

i put some pages on the front page . if you don’t want them there, you may delete them (indeed i would prefer, if only a person, which we all trust, do this job (to delete things, some of us has written)) .

i’ve been away for some time;

after checking RecentChanges i feel prompted to say that i wish this WikiFromScratchDiscussion could be kept aligned with StrategicDialogSupportSoftware … like two sides of the same reality (i.e: the near side and the far side of complexity)

what do you think of InkScape combined with WikiGoogle

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