Chris Cannam wrote: >> [Re: an earlier sentence] > It's not an argument at all. It's an observation.
An argument is to derive a conclusion from one or more premises. Your earlier sentence is indeed an argument because your conclusion that there is a problem with Wiki technology, follows from the premise - an observation - given in the complement clause of the sentence, that Wiki technology does not solve certain types of problem. My comment is that your premise has no more relevance to Wiki technology than to any other current technology. If anyone has ever made specific claims that Wikis can solve your two examples of information-management problems, you could criticise the claims but it would nonetheless still be unreasonable to criticise Wiki technology for not being a solution to your two examples. > You seem to be looking at them solely as a means of collaborative editing, > which is partly true. The relative clause in your sentence invalidates the main clause. I assume you meant, "You seem to be looking at Wikis solely as a means of collaborative editing, but I think there are other ways of looking at them." It is not true that I consider Wikis solely in terms of distributed editing (I prefer the term "distributed editing" because collaborative editing is only one of their possible uses). I do consider distributed editing to be by far the most important feature of Wikis. > But they do also have a particular structure which is imposed of the > mechanics of a wiki. Can you explain the nature of the structure(s) to which you are referring? > One could envisage other "open source" information management implementations > than wikis. Indeed, the interfaces and features provided by the current generation of Wiki software are neither the only way nor necessarily the best way of doing distributed information-management. > And they aren't a perfect analogue for open-source software development, > which is usually more tightly controlled in fact.) I didn't make that analogy; I said Wikis are to websites as open-source software is to closed-source software, which is a conceptually very different type of comparison - an analogy between relationships - and in this case a good analogy. >> I don't think it is useful to try explaining differential success >> by looking for structural similarity between the representation of the >> information and the information itself. > > I think it seems entirely useful to explain that an encyclopaedia translates > easily to a wiki because its organisation is already similar. Seems strange > to dispute it, in fact. The cross-referenced structure of an encyclopedia is equally similar to the hypertext structure of a Wiki as it is to that of a non-Wiki website yet there has not, to my knowledge, ever been a successful encyclopedia that originated on a non-Wiki website, despite non-Wiki websites being a much older invention than Wiki websites. I think the success of Wikipedia is due to factors (1)-(4) and especially the property, which is implicit in factor (3), that a Wiki makes it possible for its readers to edit its content. > Anyway, this is all pretty circular. There are arguments on either side, and > we can rehearse them forever. That is not what a circular argument means. > I'm not, in fact, particularly opposed to the idea of wikis or of having one > for Rosegarden; I'm glad to hear it. I'm surprised too because you did seem firmly opposed to the idea of Wikis at the beginning of this thread. William ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by OSTG. Have you noticed the changes on Linux.com, ITManagersJournal and NewsForge in the past few weeks? Now, one more big change to announce. We are now OSTG- Open Source Technology Group. Come see the changes on the new OSTG site. www.ostg.com _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
