Printable Version of Topic

Posted by: 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.

Posted by: Zoloft

Looking at the feature list, you (and I mean you) could implement something very close to this right now, using two open-source software platforms, and preparing a good governance model to fill in the gaps.

A Joomla! website content management system, where on the front end, you have a rich-featured searchable site, with the ability to segregate content by category and section, and by state (published or not, with the ability to build pages editable only by staff). On the back end, you have registered contributors who can write and submit, but not publish or categorize, articles. Those are authors. Your staff can be divided into administrators, editors, mangers, and these can sort, edit, and publish the contributed content.

A PHPBBS (or other open-source forum software) with a textual confirmation mechanism - and a requirement you must register under your real name (verification mechanism left as an exercise for the reader) to validate your contributions through the Joomla! CMS, and to discuss the standards and editorial policies. There would be a validation section where the identities of the staff would be displayed, and a masthead or org list on the Joomla!-driven part of the site.

The governance model would separate administrative activities from editorial and financial from both. I suppose at the top you would have a board to establish such policies and handle the business realities, and send guidance down to the editorial and enforcement sections.

Posted by: Moulton

Have you forgotten what akahele means?

Posted by: Zoloft

Definition: Playing a ukelele cautiously and with proper care.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

Too Hawaiian. Needs more distance.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

Yes I think much of this can be achieved with existing Content Management software, much of which is open source. On occasion I have played with the various easy to install CM and other website software available via Fantastico by many PHP enabled web hosts and some of these features do already (or nearly) exist.

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Hence the Esquimaux-Sprache.


Over time the license/copyright status of one's contributions to a Wikipedia article becomes meaningless (Ship of Theseus paradox), we all know that. However it's possible (likely even) that a deliberately "slower" site, being less prone to this effect, would attract a demographic which is generally more concerned (than WP-users) about the legal ownership of the content they submit, more interested in owning a couple slats of the finished fence so to speak. Perhaps this latter group then would be less thrilled about signing the copyright-holdership away to an overseeing legal entity (especially if said edits are something more worth being proud of).

Accountability is good, and so is recognition for a job well done. But there are some things you'd need to balance, delicately, against the less pleasant aspects of being surrounded by (as Meisner put it) a certain kind of fool who likes to hear the sound of his own name.

I won't pretend to have the correct answer to any of this, but I doubt it's as simple as doing everything the opposite way.

Also I'm not saying the license must or should be "free" by any definition. While I personally don't care who finds the things I write worthy of re-use, I wouldn't want to submit content under an arrangement which prohibits me from submitting the same content elsewhere in the future (you know, like the exploitative "writing contests" which high-school librarians always promote), so it should at least be a non-exclusive license.

Posted by: 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.