[Home]EricScheidRandomThoughts

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random thoughts in search of an appropriate page[title]:

Occasionally I have a thought. sometimes even they are original .. but even then they are often unformed and incomplete, and so I'll jot them here (did I also mention I don't have a great memory ;-)

I welcome contributions to this page, especially suggestions as to where to shift this content off to

I'm also hesitating about starting these on pages of their own because they might give other people ideas and we don't yet have a way of getting rid of DeletedPage""s on MeatballWiki. -- EricScheid

Not true any longer. See PageDeletion.

ephemeral announcements in wiki

see WikiMailingListIssues?

SoftSecurity/HardSecurity ... not just to prevent tangible damage

When I think of security, I think the purpose is to prevent the more tangible forms of damage (spam, deletions, etc) ... but that isn't really the full story.

Security can also be used to shape how things work - eg. door security not only prevent drunks getting in but they also implore the waiting crowd to form an orderly line. Milling about does no harm, other than making it slower to get people in.

community page for new thoughts

is there already a wiki page for random thoughts in search of an appropriate page [title]?

Cliff wanted something like this baked into the infrastructure, but it was vetoed--mostly because it was a TechnologySolution. GrabBag?? I normally use my own namepage for stuff like this. Considering that we have the practice of editing each other's namepages on occasion, I assume if I hold content too long it will be rescued. -- SunirShah

I find as much joy in contributing as I do in reading, especially when (a) additional contribution is asked for, and (b) the topic stimulates me. To assist with the latter I'll hammer RandomPage for a while, but its a hit or miss affair whether I'll find a page satisfying (a). My intention for a special page for it was to make it easier for others to do the same. This might appeal to RecentChangesJunkie""s, and also act to welcome new visitors (who might be afraid to (a) duplicate an existing page or (b) pick a really dumb page name). HelpPeopleHelpOthers?. ''

BTW -- why would this need to be baked into the infrastructure? It could simply be a page (like any other), and blatently pointed out in the welcome to wiki pages.

It doesn't need to be baked into the infrastructure, but Cliff wanted to make it really easy for newbies to post. It would work like moderated newsgroups, where you'd post into the void, and provided you weren't spamming the group, you'd eventually see it published.

Understand what you meant now. Doesn't need to be baked in, although that is an interesting idea too. Why a TechnologySolution instead of a CommunitySolution though?

Found someone else asking the same question (ImNotSureWhereThisShouldGo?) on MakeWikiMoreAccessible, so if I find a third example I might just be encouraged enough to go do it -- es

Third example: PageNameSuggestions ... now to get creative and motivated... @ 5:43 am on a Saturday morn, I don't think so.

[later] I'm thinking the name for this page, wherein people put content in want of a page name, could be PageNameWanted?. It covers the case of a discussion where no obvious, simple, and clear page name comes to mind, and also the case of having a snippet of content for which a page may already exist, but the holder of the snippet doesn't know where. The page could contain actual content, or references to other pages where a "what page name" question has remained unanswered/undecided for so long that someone has decided to point it out.

page markers for potential tangents

Some sparks of inspiration deserve to live, but not where they might set fire to the furniture. Therefore: is there an EditHint? for tagging divergent thoughts within a given page, to assist WikiGnome?""s with time on their hands? But: Would this encourage more noise?

"This is getting off-topic, but..." ?

Is [PlainEnglishPreferred] though? Perhaps a simple convention of inserting an EditHint? would suffice ... actually, come to think of it, labelling a paragraph as an EditHint? is very helpful to people who just want to read signal and not noise and can thus skip that paragraph.

See also CategoryHelpWanted?, CoordinatedCollaboration?, AccidentalCollaboration, CollaborationBooster.

meatball entry points

what are the common entry points for meatball? is the FrontPage the most common entry point? do some members have some alternative entry page, eg. YourUserName?, RecentChanges?

Any real RecentChangesJunkie uses RecentChanges as the one and only entry point. ^_^ -- AlexSchroeder
Too True. I keep some WikiName""s on my HomePage so I can go back and add and read, but for me, it's always RecentChanges or my UnifiedRecentChanges page, so I can check the diffs. --DaveJacoby

http://sunir.org/apps/refers.pl?orphans=1&targets=1

the role of notable events in a community

"remember when old man Jones singlehandedly beat off the marauding trolls back in '98?"

"yar. I remember one young'un screamin' for the PoliceForce to be called, but saner heads prevailed"

<silence>

There's a community building pattern here somewhere -- two wikis may have similar populations, viewpoints, and even topics, but they would each have unique NotableEvents?, and these bind together the members into a stronger community.

A community that celebrates it's own NotableEvents? would be a stronger community, no? What are the forces involved? What are the principles involved? Are there any AntiPatterns?? How to encourage the recording of history? WikiNow vs WikiThen??

Case history is interesting and germaine here. Celebrating accomplishments in the long term has importance in any community, but celebrating small acts is not good. You risk celebrating less-than-altruistic events. Personally, I'd recommend case history for the long term, slaps on the back for the short term, and celebration for significant events. See SlashDotted. -- SunirShah

a link via PeterMerholz? [1] and VictorLombardi? [2]

[Transforming information retrieval on the Web: a new direction]

The information produced by those social networks automatically clusters together into hierarchies. Innovative technologies seek to order the Web by automatically constructing taxonomies. In particular, studies shows that Google-style page rankings can automatically chunk content by topic. By identifying social networks on the Web, researchers automatically sort information into taxonomies.

dagnabit! In the last three months I stumbled across a search engine that automatically creates these taxonomic hierarchies from the search results, and now I've forgetten who it is. Does anyone know the name of that engine?

found it: http://vivisimo.com/ ... try it today ... go there and search for "meatball wiki" and it will create a taxonomy which includes "WikiClones?", "InterWiki", "Sunir", and "UseMod" ... very useful automatic chunking.

Via Close(theloop) [3]

The nature of trust online. In an insightful Herald IT piece today Dr Peter Grabosky from the Australian Institute of Criminology in Canberra discusses how the Internet can (and will) be used for nefarious purposes.

http://it.mycareer.com.au/e-commerce/20010423/A38144-2001Apr23.html

On wiki methodology, see also: HitAndRunRefactoring

Recently been reading how easy it is for a script kiddie to slam a website with a Distributed Denial of Service attack, as reported by [Steve Gibson, Gibson Research Corporation].

Then, while banging on RandomPages I read MeetForceWithForce ... add in a vague recollection that the Cult of the Dead Cow (?) are developing a distributed web serving technology, where bits or chunks of every page is saved across multiple servers. The intent is primarily to prevent a server being shut down or censored, the putative antagonist being TheMan? ... but now I'm thinking instead of it being a tool of the social misfits defending itself from society it could be a tool for society defending itself from social misfits.

Whaddayathnk?

WikiVandalPsychology?

Over at WardsWiki there have been a couple of vandals that stuck around long enough to put up a fight. I'm starting to see a pattern in their defenses and mindset - things like hair splitting, appeal to front page literal statements, strawmen arguments, false dichotomies, pretense of devil advocacy, philosophical musings of "what can really be known" regarding motives, and so on.

Discussion

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