On Wednesday 04 Aug 2004 18:45, William wrote: > Chris Cannam wrote: > > My problem with wiki technology is that it doesn't > > solve most of the problems I have with information management, which are > > generally to do with finding things and avoiding duplication. > > That seems like a straw-man argument because no current technology > completely solves those two problems of information management
It's not an argument at all. It's an observation. Wikis are often cited as a wondrous thing, and I'm explaining why I don't see them as quite so wondrous: they don't solve most of the problems I have. You seem to be looking at them solely as a means of collaborative editing, which is partly true. But they do also have a particular structure which is imposed of the mechanics of a wiki. One could envisage other "open source" information management implementations than wikis. (And they aren't a perfect analogue for open-source software development, which is usually more tightly controlled in fact.) So I think it's wrong to say that if I like the idea of "open source" information management, I should necessarily like wikis. > >> As an example of a healthy Wiki, the Wikipedia www.wikipedia.org is an > >> excellent encyclopedia which is used regularly by thousands of "real" > >> people > > > > Yes, but that's the "fallacy of atypical example". > > Do you know what the fallacy of converse accident (this is the correct > philosophical term) means? I'm not familiar with it as a philosophical term, as you'll have inferred from the fact that I didn't use that name. I'm familiar with it as a convenient encapsulation of (for example) why people who talked up the money-making potential of the Web based on the apparent success of companies like eBay were wrong. Nonetheless, > inappropriate use of inductive reasoning to obtain a > generalisation from one or more atypical instances is certainly what I meant. > I mentioned Wikipedia to give an example of a good Wiki, not to argue > that Wikis are generally good. Then we're talking at cross purposes. I thought the proposition was that wikis are generally good. > > wiki terms (note that an encyclopaedia is already structurally very much > > like a wiki, the wiki just adds links and the "open-source" part). > > 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. > By the way, a Wiki doesn't "add links" It does over the paper encyclopaedia. Anyway, this is all pretty circular. There are arguments on either side, and we can rehearse them forever. I'm not, in fact, particularly opposed to the idea of wikis or of having one for Rosegarden; I just started arguing about it because most of the wikis I've seen have been useless. That of course, as you know and say, doesn't mean they have to be. But I do think the concept is not as self-evidently brilliant as some seem to think. Chris ------------------------------------------------------- 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
