ForestFireCase

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A ForestFire occurs when a newcomer arrives and starts creating page after page in BrainstormMode.

This was taken from AlexSchroeder's page and could use some reworking.

Editor's note: Later, WikiCanonicalization? was renamed to TopicCanonicalization to fit the StyleGuide, and ProductiveWikiOverlap? was deleted.

Case Story

I think the discussion is very interesting. LionKimbro has introduced a whole lot of ideas into the system in a very short time, and some of them I really like. Here are some of the ideas I really like: InevitableOverlap?, ContentRequiresCommunity?. And would also like to write about the PageLifeCycle.

The discussion is also spreading onto various pages, so I'm trying to collect my own thoughts here for the moment. There are just too many edit conflicts when I try to join the discussion.

Here's for LionKimbro. Regarding ProductiveWikiOverlap? and some of the discussion you are having with SunirShah: Here is how I see your current position.

You have a vision or notion of some upcoming change. You think it is big, very big. And it encompasses many things. Explaining it takes many metaphors. It is interconnected. It cannot be understood by just picking out a single aspect of it.
You start writing about various aspects of it, connecting them, expecting the sum of all aspects to evolve into a representation of your vision.
In the meantime, people like Sunir and me are confused. We don't understand the importance of a particular aspect, and we start questioning it. We would like you to put more effort into describing one aspect coherently.
We also don't understand what you are getting at, and we doubt that it requires that many pages to describe. Therefore, we feel the urge to clean up after you, removing the perceived shallow pages.
You feel annoyed by our disregard for your efforts, and rightly so.
We feel annoyed by your disregard for our community expectations, and rightly so.
I started to rework TopicCanonicalization.
A new discussion springs up arround my book review. It touches upon canonicalization issues. I worked it into the TopicCanonicalization page.
You start a new discussion on ProductiveWikiOverlap?, bringing in things you touched upon before.
We still don't understand the larger picture you are thinking of, so your references to the aspects you have started to write but which we deleted are lost upon us.
Instead we return to our traditional tools: Community is important, write coherent essays (even short ones -- one or two paragraphs are a good start) on a page, focus on the argument, suggest new ways at categorizing the facts (and thus how to split and merge your pages such that they make sense to us again).
You discount our reliance on community and claim that we don't get blogging, syndication, communities of interest, etc.
It is shaking us up. Good. I'm being inspired.
Our communication skills need improving. You seem to be unable to tell us what you want to tell us, and we seem to be unable to tell you how we would like it to be written.

Regarding some of the stuff on ProductiveWikiOverlap?. I think the key problems are the following:

Too many new pages are confusing. Why can't we talk about one thing after another? Is the issue so complex and hard to put into words that we need to define many different aspects and interrelate them, before the whole starts to make sense? Some problems are like that. But it seems that I can't follow, and thus I agree with Sunir -- a lot of the pages you refer to seem shallow. I don't see the big picture. And given the pages TopicCanonicalization, WikiOverlap?? and ProductiveWikiOverlap?, I am confused. What content goes where? Are we done exploring overlap and boundaries? Are we applying it to wikis? Talking about benefits and penalties? I think we are. But where? Offering more choice makes decisions harder.

This does not concern the IntelligenceFailure and BeyondFear pages. I understand that IntelligenceFailure talks about the right information being at the right time at the right time. Good. The BeyondFear book review has been used as a case story on some of these pages. Good.

TopicCanonicalization, ProductiveWikiOverlap?, and the implied WikiOverlap? will all talk about the same thing: Overlap and boundaries. Good. We will rework this eventually into one page. So far, no problem for me. If there really so many aspects to the overlap issue, we will split pages when we get there.

Too many ideas result in a jargon problem. Perhaps the many-pages problem is an outgrow of your many ideas, which you want to put down somewhere, so you start a page for each one of them. But to us, this is a JargonProblem! To us, those are shallow pages and the ideas are interesting in the original context, but there seems no point to put them on separate pages right now. Putting them on separate pages makes all of this harder to read right now. On its own, SymphonyEffect? is not interesting. Perhaps, in the future, these ideas will have taken a life of their own, and there will be dedicated pages for them. But we are the audience right now -- and we don't understand. At least I don't. This is why I agree with Sunir. Fold shallow pages back into the original page. Focus on one page after another and write it well so that the audience can read it right now and understand it right now.

Misleading page names. This is a temporary problem and we will be able to solve them eventually, if we don't create big networks of interconnected pages before finishing one page after another. Given that I feel we haven't accreted enough content in the first place, a page name like WikiSpecificDefinitionsToSolveOverlap? would not be appropriate at this time, I think. We haven't finished talking about overlap. We haven't finished talking about benefits and drawbacks. We haven't finished talking about managing them. And we haven't finished talking about the wiki-specific aspects of it. We have only just begun talking about wikis, and their domains, and we have started to collect a benefit or two, and a drawback, and described two ways to handle the situation. But the page is not reworked, yet, and it is still all very much in flux.

How to introduce new ideas. Actually all of this reminds me of how BayleShanks started on Meatball. He collected his ideas on his Meatball homepage, and slowly extracted interesting parts into separate Meatball pages. We talked about conflict resolution. And later we talked about role models. And we created new categories for conflict related stuff, and for role modelling. And we created new pages for that. It was good. I did not always agree with the new pages he created, and it was this dissonance that inspired me to write new stuff myself. So I really welcome the dissonance. It helps us all.

Wikis are not blogs. We don't feel wikis are only knowledge repositories. We don't feel blogs are a very good tool to build intellectual communities. All your assertions in this direction need more arguments, more discussion. This is very interesting, and very much on-topic, and I would love to discuss this.

In any case, we don't feel chained to one wiki. We decide to be part of a wiki (community). We don't want to decouple community from content. In fact, some of the pages on this wiki argue that it this is hard to do. To some, Wikipedia has managed to do it. To others, Wikipedia has a attracted a large number of contributors forming a new community. Not everybody likes it.

The question of community and content is interesting, and I am starting to see how this might be the cause of some of the friction, here. Because some of us do in fact believe that intelligence, as you call it, will always be assembled by a community. Without community, no leadership and no adaptability and no motivation and no productivity. Or is it? Interesting question. Not to be just asserted like that, in any case. I should write about this, as I said above.

OK: I'm studying your page. I just read ForestFire, and started to move what I think is controversial into it, but I see that a bit more should be going into it. I honestly do not know what to do right now- I am studying your page. (Just letting you know, right now, before I actually read it all out.)

It did occur to me that this is a lot to speak at once. I thought, when I came in, that I'd put in a few fragments, and everyone would know what I was describing, and will fill in all the pieces. It did not curry to me that the "big picture" was not equally seen.

I have been trying to follow the Cartesian method- breaking the situation into pieces, starting by explaining the little pieces (like TheDiscoveryProcess? and its parts: UndifferentiatedNewSubject?, ConstellationIdentification?, etc., etc.,.), and then building up to the larger and larger pieces, until the whole thing is there. If I understand right, that doesn't work in this medium.

So, I'm going to take a few deep breaths, and carefully study what you wrote.

I want to say: These ideas aren't "going anywhere." If you delete the pages, the ideas aren't gone. So, now that I understand the problem of the ForestFire, I do not mind if those pages are deleted. Maybe we should start over, and I can use what I learn from your advice.

I wish I had your phone number right now.

A lot of my ideas are stemming from [a notebook system I tried out.] It's basically about information management, and I realized that it applies to the Internet organization as a whole. In fact, TopicCanonicalization already happens- as I said, Meatball Wiki is already the canonical community discussion site. But I see TopicCanonicalization taking many steps forward, and in fact, merging with a much larger concept of Internet-wide canonicalization.

So, the deep breaths now.

And it's okay to delete those pages now.

Okay: I believe the solution is to write the complete vision on my personal web page. Just promise to read it..! -- LionKimbro

I read it. I think this is an excellent first step. I enjoyed reading that very much. I don't always agree with the style, and I don't follow all the arguments (some still are just assertions), but now that I know these are your notes, it is much more palatable than before. It is the raw stuff used to build pages. -- AlexSchroeder

Well, that makes the two of us. I don't agree with the "style" either. I call it "rough draft" and "organizing thoughts." I have reasons behind the "just assertions", it just takes time to lay things out. Thank you for reading. {:)}= I know that you are being very patient, and you have my appreciation. -- LionKimbro

Alex, seeing as you are almost there, would you mind taking this write up of our interaction with Lion and turning it into a case study? I think it serves as a valuable example of where SpaghettiWiki would be useful. Also, your opinions on SpaghettiWiki would be most desirable. -- SunirShah

Not sure what to do about the Lion interaction. It worked for me, but looking at it now... I extracted useful generalizations and put them on other pages, but do we really want to make it a case story? -- AlexSchroeder

Hunh. I feel like I'm under a microscope. Regardless. I think I found a good solution: Just make a new wiki. -- LionKimbro

The case study is only interesting from the perspective of how we reacted to you. It should be value neutral towards the subject. -- SunirShah

Ok. It still feels weird. But ok. Incidentally, I like the SpaghettiWiki idea. -- LionKimbro

I am still trying to understand ForestFire, I think I understood it until I read this case. To me a ForestFire is created by a Troll, so it is malicious. I had something happen to me when I worked on [CivicActions]. It was suggested that it was a ForestFire. It drained the energy out of me, not being able to work with the person. Help. MarkDilley

Quoting from ForestFire...

: "You can tell that you are experiencing a ForestFire when you suddenly lose track of where the rapidly expanding "front" of the argument is. You feel that you are making the same point in multiple places. You have to argue "laterally", across pages, in order to put forward a cohesive perspective. You no longer know what pages are related to the argument because people keep creating new ones in a self-defeating effort to contain the discussion, to recan the worms so to speak. Older pages, even gems, become casualties as the interlocutors recruit them for the fight.

: "...Even well intentioned people can fall into this trap. Often a deep-seated community disagreement can flood across the entire PageDatabase. Every case becomes an event to redebate the some points. Every point becomes grounded with every case."

Another recent example might shortly be the SpaghettiWiki debate, but we're trying a new experiment in controlling it (i.e. a test SpaghettiWiki). To control any ForestFire, you have to recan the worms. Be merciless. See ForestFire for details. -- SunirShah

RefactorMercilessly? is a meme that you have mentioned many times before. I will consider that at CivicActions?. Thanks, MarkDilley

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