Pialatok, As far away from wiki as you can get. Options

[GlassBeadGame]

Having convinced (myself) that Mediawiki software and Free Licenses do not promote collaboration but merely provides an aggregation of highly individualized decisions about content that hope for a never arriving invisible hand to sort out looking for some alternative software seems in order. Wiki, I am told, is the Hawaiian word for quick. Let's put as much distance as possible between the ideal software for collaboration and wiki. A handy internet resource of uncertain reliability tells me that Pialatok is the Inuit word for slow. Embracing this as antitheses of wiki let's explore what a Pialatok collaborative software might look like.


A minimum set of features:

• A period of mandatory reflection delaying any submission and making it withdrawable by the contributor.
• A opportunity for people who are working on the article or subject matter area of a new article to review a new contribution prior to implementing changes.
• The ability of one or more editors (true sense) to act as project managers and assign tasks.
• A hierarchy of user permissions that provides credentialed or acknowledged knowledgeable contributors greater control and access than those lacking these qualities.
• A content dispute resolution system that fully recognizes expertise and contribution history and is not easily overwhelmed by "outsiders" to the article, subject matter or relevant disciplines.
• A licensing scheme that acknowledges ownership of content by a legal entity responsible for overseeing the overall direction and content of the project.

More thought needs to given to expanding or refining this feature list. Of course this removes the much of the Tom Sawyer Fence Whitewashing that led to the rapid expansion of Wikipedia. This won't work as a huckster's business model but it might provide a tool for promoting real, serious and sustained collaboration.

[Moulton]

If I can settle down to a serious point for a second (I promise to be brief)...

There is a classic fable featuring the Tortoise and the Hare (alternatively, Achilles and the Tortoise), which explores the meme of "Slow and steady wins the race."

A related meme is "Winning the battle, but losing the war."

Perhaps Milton Roe can weigh in here, but it occurs to me that this recurring theme is related to the tug-of-war between two complementary reward systems. On the one hand, we have the dopamine-driven instant gratification reward system which attends to very short term gains. On the other hand, we have the endorphin-driven delayed gratification reward system which attends to winning the grand prize at the end of long and arduous struggle.

Fruitless addictions tend to be dopamine-driven Sisyphean cycles that never really get anywhere in the long run. A great deal of what happens in WikiCulture is dopamine-driven tug-of-wars that go nowhere fast. The Mike Handel Hoax is an example of a slow and steady process where the endorphin rush at the end far outweighed the sum of the short-term dopamine-driven incremental gains.

To my mind, the grand prize would be the production of a successful comic opera that definitively parodied WikiCulture.

But for now, I'll settle for Abd putting up a YouTube of him performing some randomly chosen atrocious song parody.