(2003-06-28) Tim Bray Sam Ruby Wiki For Collaboration Ware

Tim Bray on the Wiki For CollaborationWare experience in Sam Ruby's Echo Standards project. The weird thing about the Wiki work is that successive refactorings appear to produce coherent structure out of chaos via the sum of a lot of independent Collective Action. Which feels like it ought somehow to be a violation of the Second Law of Thermo-Dynamics. But there you go. I haven't been participating, but it's great that it's working for some people. Others haven't been as pleased. My experience says:

• non-coherent groups have problems collaborating meaningfully, regardless of medium
  • but one of my interests in the Node Web idea is the potential to restate/refactor someone's statements into (a) separate granular bits (b) that have less Semantic Noise so they can be productively responded to. But that's probably a dream, since people probably wouldn't like to restating their statements, even if you left the original. And their responses to your responses would be just as irrational and noisy (unlike your own clear objective additions :) ). (Disputation Arena, Claim-Refactoring Service)
  • perhaps a Prediction Market is a way to test whether a claim is coherent enough to bet on?
• even for a coherent group I'd generally recommend pushing the messy discussion through an EMail list, then refactoring that into coherent Wiki pages (Summarizing Is Necessary). (I recommended the same thing for OSAF/Chandler - right now some discussion happens via EMail, some happens right in the wiki.)

Jul01: Clay Shirky believes the Wiki model removes the personality problems from the process, and that this is particulary necessary given the personality problems in the RSS history. When the problem with the process is social, the solution should be social too. I think he's off-base. Sometimes technology can impose some social process constraints which can help, but I think social problems are ultimately human problems, and technology can't really "solve" those problems. (It can help hide them for awhile, but human pathology does its own Route Around!)