On Friday 06 Aug 2004 18:21, William wrote: > 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.
You said it was a "straw-man argument". That means you think I invented a position for you that was easy to argue against, so as to increase my chance of prevailing. That's not true. I wasn't interested in refuting anything you said, but in expressing a different opinion about wikis based on other qualities of theirs. That's why I said I was observing rather than arguing. > My comment is that > your premise has no more relevance to Wiki technology than to any other > current technology. Nonsense. My observation was that a wiki doesn't solve some of the information management problems I see as pressing. Since a wiki is an information management technology, it's very reasonable to ask whether it solves particular information management problems. The thrust is not "is this thing intrinsically any good?", but "does it help me?" If we were discussing music notation software, and I said that I felt Rosegarden was useless to me because I wanted fret diagrams and it didn't do them -- would you dispute that? Surely not. > I didn't make that analogy; I said Wikis are to websites as open-source > software is to closed-source software But you also said that was a reason you'd have expected me to like them. I don't think that follows. Similarly there could be many different models of open source software development, and I don't think it's axiomatic that I'd like all of them. Still, you did only say you were surprised that I didn't -- which is not in fact unreasonable, I'll concede. > > 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. We were never discussing non-wiki websites. We were discussing whether a wiki that reproduces an encyclopaedia would be more likely to succeed than one that doesn't. If the structure of a wiki was quite unlike that of an encyclopaedia, that would surely reduce the chance of a wiki-encyclopaedia being a success. Do you _really_ think that's not true? Of course that's not enough to explain Wikipedia's success. My point is that your other reasons (nice people wanting to help, etc) could apply to almost any wiki, which is why I think you want to propose them, but I don't think they're enough either to explain the success of Wikipedia. It's fundamentally a wiki attempting a thing for which a wiki is particularly well suited, and so more likely to succeed than many other wikis. > > 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 sorry. What I meant to say was "this is all pretty damn stupid". The point of this discussion (however fierily it began) was to consider whether a wiki would be useful for Rosegarden. Whether Wikipedia is successful or not was marginally relevant. Whether wikis address some of the information management problems that we have with Rosegarden now was and is entirely relevant. I'm sure there are many other things that are relevant to the discussion, but ensuring that every opinion must be supported in logic is the wrong way to set about finding them. So, enough. 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
