CommunityWikiArchive

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This page archives some of the discussion that led to the creation of CommunityWiki. (WikiEmigration?)

See also AlexSchroederArchive?, BayleShanks, HelmutLeitner

I think I just grasped - after some confusion - what this project is all about. If it works, it is a vast project, because it encloses almost all social groups and all online communities in some languages. If I stick to what I wrote on TargetGroup then it can't work, because it is too heterogenous - but who knows what works? [one of my favourites: "predictions are difficult when they are about the future"] If it works it would bridge the gap between millions of offline communities and the online world! Whow! I wish the project a healthy start and a long life! -- HelmutLeitner

I think the scope is not so broad, because I believe in small groups of people talking with each other. There is not room for more than 20 active contributors, and there is only so much 20 active contributors will be interested in. -- AlexSchroeder

But how can you handle this? Let's assume a teacher wants to talk about school communities. He needs a few people interested in schools and understanding schools. This would mean to look for some of this target group. Then comes a priest caring about his community. Do you think they will find a common theoretical basis, without wanting to talk about their specifics? How do you define the scope? How will you restrict the number of contributors? Why does that matter? -- HelmutLeitner

If they do not find a common basis, then they have reached the wrong forum. My experience has been that wikis don't have large numbers of contributors. If we are flooded, we will solve this problem then and there. -- AlexSchroeder

I didn't start talking about capacity limits. WikiPedia is a counter-example. The CommunityWiki is more general than WikiPedia. Not everybody is interested in general knowledge, but everybody is somehow related to one or more communities. Perhaps what you describe is more a "social wiki", because management, mediation, teaching and other phenomena will also happen outside of communities (except if you make the definition of community very wide). -- HelmutLeitner

Note that since CommunityWiki is OpenContent, anyone could fork it, start an OnlineCommunityWiki or whatever, and take a subset of CommunityWiki's content. The topical scope can essentially be refactored the same way we refactor individual wiki pages. Anyone can create a new wiki page which is more or less broad than a previous one, and copy some of the content to the new page (and then the rest of the community can decide which page lives and dies, either by deleting one immediately, or seeing which one gets used over a longer period of time). With OpenContent, you can also create an entire wiki with different topical scope, and copy some of the content of the old one. (you wouldn't have to copy those pages one-by-one; using WikiGateway, you could copy a list of pages in about a paragraph of Perl.)

Although it would be possible to do something similar with MeatballWiki, it would require some degree of consensus and permission (because moving content would only be legal if the destination was also within the MeatBall project).

So choosing the right topical scope right off the bat is not as essential as for an OpenContent wiki as for a non-OpenContent wiki.

-- BayleShanks

CommunityWikiArchive

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