User talk:Brynosaurus~metawiki

Comments welcome! Brynosaurus 12:41, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Separate branches for small groups to collaborate on isn't a bad idea to allow groups some freedom from harassment while working on common text. But if branches remain separated--and even worse, mutually exclusive--then you will miss makes Wikipedia so good. "Adversarial editing" where users who disagree with each other push each other, check each other's references, and challenge each other's assumptions is an essential part of the wiki (and academic) process. Don't make it too easy for users who disagree to take their ball and go to their own revision. 198.88.152.158 17:08, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I like it. For the votes, I was thinking that votes propagate backwards, not forward. Each user will carry a vote with them. When they move between branches, their vote will follow, and percolate down to the trunk. (This doesn't have to be done explicitly all the way down, because the branches generally converge pretty quickly.)

certainly an advangtage is that people who disrespect consensus will quickly recognize the futility of their way of thinking, without people having to explain the obvious to them over and over again. People will realize more directly what will fly and what won't, by the sheer math, and that will encourage more fair and practical editing, without providing them with the opportunity to project their chagrin on others, and engage in futile but annoying fights. Which leads to another advantage: the reduction of person-centered conflict will diminish aggression and distrust that tend to reinforcement idealogical schisms.

Regarding "adversarial editing", perhaps the problem can be thought of in terms of incentives and social gravitating centers, such as information sources: I think users would be more inclined to compare sources and cooperate if there were some features for sources built into the wiki.

Some analogies I thought of for the branching idea:

• optician, switching thru lenses with the big lens-machine thing to give you the perfect eyeglasses.
• Darwinian evolution (the tree of life) (this one is obvious, and i imagine that it is a common analogy)
• morphospace (the hypothetical(probabalistic) space of potential paths of structural development for a developing embryo)
• stochastic markov chains
• emergent collective behavior of ants (by themselves, they walk randomly-the branches. votes are pherome.)
• diffusion limited aggregation (growth of fractal structures, such as snowflakes, the diffusion is limited by the cost of creating new branches and the path-reinforcing positive feedback of votes)
• weiner process, sub-gaussian. (norbert weiner is one of the founders of the field of cybernetics) (sub-gaussian because of the trajectory auto-reinforcement effect of votes)

etc. I think such a medium; such a flow-constraint dynamic, is well-suited to the constituitive forces that will utilize it (the users). That is, if the medium is a channel, and the users' input to the system are liquid being poured into the channel, I think the combination of the two will result in a high-quality encyclopedia being poured out. Or, to put it another way, the relaxations of potential energies - the non-equilibrium thermodynamic processes of heat(energy/disorder) dissipation - will favor, through this material, the formation of convection cells with the form and content of an encyclopedia.

Okay, I got a little carried away. I hope that was comprehensible. To put it in plain english, I'm excited about your ideas. Kevin baas 18:35, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

not at all comfortable with this system, seems to defeat the consensus basis for wikipedia. consensus isn't reached by democratic process, we are not really trying to make an 'encyclopedia of what the majority wants' we are trying to make something much more potent, an 'encyclopedia of undisputed facts' . by voting or by the suggested branch system, we diverge from consensus at each branch or each vote. I appreciate the enormous amount of work involved in creating the idea, but I don't feel it is best for us all. My suggestion for edit wars is: if someone reverts your page, point it out to 2 other editors, and drop out of the argument.. if you can't stand to drop out of the argument, it's a sure sign of bias... I'll discuss this at length another time if you like, just drop me a line. And thanks for all the effort you've put into this, you obviously have the unselfish diligence that I see as essential to this project. drop me a line if you like.Pedant 11:08, 2004 Aug 18 (UTC)

I received a similar reaction against the basic idea of "voting" from Jimbo Wales on the wikitech-l list, and I suspect it will be a common objection. But my perspective is that voting is not necessarily at odds with consensus-building; in fact it can be a vital tool without which in many cases consensus will never happen. Witness all the informal uses of voting people already engage in all over wikipedia, for the purpose of resolving contentious issues. In order for sensible decisions to be made, sensible alternatives must be considered - but if none of the participants' alternative visions can actually be realized and presented without continual interference from the others (or from downright incivil trolls or vandals), then all but the most dedicated (or most ideologically motivated) participants will likely drop out out of frustration, and the resulting content is just an impoverished mess of conflicting visions mashed together.

Voting does not necessarily eliminate the motivation for participants to build consensus and incorporate minority viewpoints. Most sensible participants in a venture like Wikipedia usually want to get along and address the legitimate concerns of others, including the concerns of tiny minorities of one; they just don't necessarily want to be subject to constant harrassment by trolls and ideologues who will never contribute to consensus in any case. Furthermore, each of the members of a 90% majority viewpoint participating in one discussion on one page has a very good motivation to listen to and consider the 10% minority viewpoint, even if they don't have to follow it - because each one of those members of that 90% majority realizes that on a different issue being discussed on a different page at a different time, they might find themselves a 10% minority facing down a 90% majority group that happens to include the person that happened to hold the 10% minority viewpoint on the first page. ("Tyranny of the majority" is certainly a problem in certain broken voting systems, such as the two-party system of the U.S. - but that's because the two-party system is rigged to make sure the same majority gets to decide on every issue, until the public eventually gets fed up and flip-flops to the other party. But let's not go there. :) )

FYI, my interest in this idea isn't born out of personal frustration about revert or edit wars, as I gather you're assuming from your response - I haven't even been in an edit war yet. My interest is rather born out of a desire to see the wiki idea eventually successfully scale to public collaboration systems perhaps hundreds or thousands of times the size and popularity of the current wikipedia, in which there might be hundreds of active watchers and/or editors butting heads on popular or controversial pages rather than just two or three or five, and in which the content being edited collaboratively might not always just be "cold hard facts" (as on Wikipedia) but also really controversial stuff such as public policy recommendations produced via mass popular participation. In such an environment I suspect current Wiki systems would survive about as long as an ice cube in hell. Even Wikipedia, with its emphasis on dealing only with "undisputed" facts, could in a few years easily become yet another of those nice idealistic technological experiments like Usenet that was great until the spammers took over and chased out all the intelligent contributors.

Brynosaurus 03:50, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)