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[tools-yak@collab] Re: turned on ExpandingWikiWords on my wikilog

To: tools-yak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: Bill Seitz <bill@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 14:22:52 -0400
Message-id: <3EC3DAFC.7050605@fluxent.com>
For the wicket/fuzzy/exploratory mode, would you agree that refactoring 
a wiki becomes more important? And that such refactoring probably 
includes renaming and/or splitting nodes?    (01)

This gets nasty as a wiki gets bigger, because if you explode a page 
into multiple pages, it's hard to go back through all the BackLinks and 
point them at the new pages.    (02)

PurpleNumbers could help, except that they are page-specific.    (03)

This is what led to my NodeWeb thinking, which could be in retrospect be 
interpreted as copying chunks of the OHS design.    (04)

http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/NodeWeb    (05)

<incoherent>It would be cool to be able to hack wiki enough to support 
some level of transclusion and outlining so that the back end would be 
node-level granularity, and node-level linking would be encouraged, but 
it would maybe not feel too "choppy".</incoherent>    (06)

cdent@blueoxen.org wrote:    (07)

>
>
>What's great about all this, though, is that I can go around
>creating piles and shouting eureka every now and again and you
>can eventually gain something from my product. Meanwhile, you can
>create clear, well-defined ideas that help other people like you
>as well as people like me who will stack them up and squeal with
>delight and say, "See, look, it's really AllTheSameThing".
>
>And thus we engage in communication that leads to the creation of
>knowledge. It's messy, sure, and it can be improved, but it is
>how these things work.
>
>Tools like Wiki, Blogs, PurpleNumbers improve things by creating
>referential networks of exposure that I think inspire lateral thinking.
>
>Tools like RDF, NLP and other "rigorous" friends alongside
>traditional classification and IR improve things by facilitating
>retrieval; question answering.
>
>This is a classic dichotomy in library and information science.
>It makes for great arguments because it tears right down to the
>core of what we are trying to do. It's encapsulated in the
>question: What's a better library: one where you can browse the
>shelves, or one where you use the card catalog to find a book
>which you then must ask someone to retrieve from the stacks.
>
>I like the former, but I understand that both are needed.
>
>My personal philosophy, though, is that when trying to solve
>wicked problems that are so wicked they don't really have a name
>one puts a significant limitation on oneself if one chooses to be
>in a world of conceptual clarity. We don't need answers to
>questions we are able to articulate. That is we don't need to do
>information retrieval. Rather we need to create ideas based
>analogy, connection, comparison, contrast to be able to start
>asking questions.
>
>Once you know the questions, boom, it then becomes necessary to
>spend some time in the land of conceptual clarity: questions need
>to be asked and answered, hypotheses need to be tested,
>information needs to be shared with clarity...
>
>As far as I've been led to believe, those two paragraphs describe
>innovative science in action.
>
>Anyway, Wiki can be a tool in this process, for some people.
>
>  
>    (08)

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