Branched wikis: why on earth?

The Green Dragon. Lazy sunshine casts mote-shadows on the fine wooden table. The smell of microbrews and hacker sweat is in the air.

Blakkat: Damn, git rocks. I've been using Subversion all this time, and now I'll never go back.

Velvet: What? I'm personally quite a fan of subversion; ha!

Max: He's talking about version control systems.

Velvet: Yeah, I was kidding. But seriously, I don't really know what the big deal is. I know that git was developed in like a week by Linus Torvalds, demigod to hackers for launching the Linux kernel. But what makes it so cool?

Blakkat: Well, it's distributed, which means that every cloned git repository has a full history of all branches and you can do all your merges and commits locally, which is much faster, and then any two repo's can merge their forks rather than waiting to do everything through a central server.

Velvet: pause Right. looks thoughtful

Max: explains repos, branches, merges, commits, forks.

Velvet: Oh, Max. Thanks for the review. But I've just been thinking about my wiki project.

Blakkat: What? No, wikis are a whole different thing. git is for programming.

Max: Well, wikis do have versioning, most of 'em.

Blakkat: Yeah, generally just a frickin' flat history. thoughtful Say, you could marry a wiki to real system, like git. After all, it's just text...

Max: I think there are a couple wikis that do that, like ikiwiki.

Velvet: Hmmm, what if we took a step farther!

Blakkat: Such as...

Velvet: Look, what's the difference between wikis and blogs?

Max: Well, wikis are collaborative, which means a lot of people contribute to them. Blogs are usually just one person's perspective.

Blakkat: Yeah, and there's like five million blogs and no one can keep up with them.

Max: While wikis are always suffering from a lack of participation, ha!

Velvet: Except Wikipedia.

Max: sudden vehemence Fuck Wikipedia! Taking all these voices and trying to smooth them all together into one "official" version of the truth. All the spats between editors, all the one-upmanship, all the pretend freedom. That's not my vision of open source knowledge!

Blakkat: Hey! I can see your point, man, but I love that Wikipedia has so many different kinds of people contributing to it, and it's all free. It's a heck of a lot less elitist than a few French dudes trying to write down the whole truth for all of humanity!

Velvet: Well, what if we could combine the best of blogs and wikis, even Wikipedia?

Max: Say more.

Velvet: Well, blogs and wikis are both trying to deal with the problem of editorial control.

Max: Yeah: freedom of the press don't mean shit unless you control a press.

Velvet: But one danger is that information just flows by, it doesn't persist, it's hard to refer to later on, it gets stale. Another danger is that too much content can be worse than useless, because no one can sift through it all, as you said Blakkat.

Blakkat: No shit. I barely keep up with anything anymore, unless someone recommends it to me. Or I'm procrastinating, which is when I do my best work.

Velvet: Exactly: the people that recommend things to us are doing crucial work. But we don't have much infrastructure for making this kind of "distributed editing" useful. In a way, that's something that Wikipedia is trying to address.

Max: But they're fucked because they keep trying to end up with one universal truth that everyone can agree to. But that just waters everything down! That's why I prefer blogs: even if there's too damn much, at least it's interesting and provocative and colorful.

Velvet: So, what if we had branches of a wiki, one for each editor?

pause

Blakkat: Oh, interesting.

Max: So, anyone could be the ultimate decisionmaker for what stays and what goes?

Blakkat: Yeah, but the user reading the site gets to choose which editors they like. No one chooses for them.

Max: How's this different from a blog? I mean, that's true on a blog too.

Velvet: Well, the key would be to create a culture where people are working on the same texts.

Blakkat: Just in different versions.

Max: What would be the incentive to edit someone else's work? Who would get credit for the resulting ... palimpsest. (Whoa, that's the first time I've ever used that word in a conversation!)

Blakkat: (Show off!) But I think Max's got a point.

Velvet: People are attached to the prestige of authorship. But on Wikipedia, and a lot of other wikis, you generally don't have your "byline" by your contribution.

Blakkat: Yeah, you're offering to th cause, and the kick of seeing your work up on the web where lots of people read it.

Velvet: There's something else: by writing something that you know is going to be edited and refined and reviewed by tons of other people that you respect, you can be more confident that it's going to end up contributing to something really beautiful.

Max: Rather than just adding yet another interestigly flawed screed to the rubbish heap of digital history?

Velvet: Something like that.

Max: There's something else I just thought of.

Blakkat: What?

Max: This could be a way for people to write perspectives they don't necessarily share, or that to explore things they're not sure of.

Blakkat: Well, you can do that anyway. If you're nervous about it, you can just be "anonymous".

Max: But people tend not to read anonymous stuff, unless it's collected and promoted by an editor. So in this case, the editor could be gathering all these different perspectives, according to whatever ideological or personal persuasion they (and their readers) think is important.

Velvet: And the editor isn't responsible for what people have written, just for promoting that it's interesting!

Max: Exactly.

Blakkat: Hey, I bet this wouldn't be too hard to implement.

Velvet: The UI would be crucial. People need to easily be able to access alternative versions of existing pages, links, etc.

Max: And editors need to be able to see relevant new contributions to other branches that they may want to merge to their own. As well as being able to easily accept some contributions to their branch and reject others...

Blakkat: Basically, you're talking about melding gitweb's interface with a wiki frontend. That shouldn't be too hard... Except

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