On Mon, May 12, 2003 at 07:12:31PM +0100, Peter P. Jones wrote: (01)
> Wiki words are bowing and scraping to the inadequacies of the tools.
> Secondly, mashing concepts together in unwarranted neologisms
> actually encourages conceptual elision, increases misunderstandings
> between disparate cliques, and reduces the chances of finding
> important 'missing nothings'...imho. (02)
Do free links discourage conceptual elision, decrease
misunderstandings between disparate cliques, and increase the chances
of finding important "missing nothings"? (03)
Could you suggest a scenario in which a WikiWord exhibited the
behavior you described? I'll accept a hypothetical scenario, although
I'd love a real one. (04)
On the CollabWiki, we've listed a pattern called "Water Cooler." (05)
http://collab.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?PatternRepository#nid08 (06)
It's not filled out yet, but Americans can probably guess the gist of
the pattern. I first proposed this pattern on our internal list
without explanation, and Shinya -- who is Japanese -- had no idea what
I was talking about. There was a cultural bias in my choice of term,
and I never would have realized this if Shinya hadn't pointed this
out. (07)
Now, suppose this Wiki was actively used by a much larger community,
and suppose I had created a pattern page called "WaterCooler", and
Shinya had independently created a page describing a similar pattern,
but had named it something else entirely. That cultural mismatch
happens whether or not we have WikiWords. However, by giving people a
public forum in which to express their views, and by monitoring that
forum, you encourage people to discover these missed collisions, and
the Wiki's openness encourages people to connect these two concepts. (08)
WikiWords are what they are. You can like them or not. The Wikipedia
folks decided they didn't like them, and I think Wikipedia is an
excellent example of emergent behavior. WikiWords have affordances,
but I don't think those affordances are so groundbreaking that similar
tools won't have similar or even better effects. (09)
-Eugene (010)
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This message is archived at: (011)
http://collab.blueoxen.net/forums/cgi-bin/mesg.cgi?a=tools-yak&i=20030512185052.GJ4031@douge.blueoxen.net (012)
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