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2013-04-26 Emacs Wiki Redesign

I finally installed the new theme for Emacs Wiki. Feel free to leave comments on the Talk page. Bootstrap allows me to make all the changes at run-time, ie. add a few scripts including a script that changes the wiki’s HTML (emacs-bootstrap.js) and a new CSS file (bootstrap.css).

Since no changes to the script are necessary I can continue to provide the old theme for those that don’t feel like switching.

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Comments on 2013-04-26 Emacs Wiki Redesign

Yay for bootstrap! It really makes the life easier if you want your web application to look consistently.

Radomir Dopieralski 2013-04-26 15:22 UTC

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2013-01-22 Gists on Emacs Wiki

I just read a rant about Emacs Wiki and it’s alternative: The Wikemacs Experiment: 300 Days Later. Check out How Emacs Wiki Works for some context from my point of view. Anyway, the anonymous author says: “Maybe someone could work with Alex to add gist-style code snippets to Oddmuse, and make it so that code can be cited inline on Wiki pages, so that anyone visiting the page is automatically looking at the most up to date version of the code.”

Let’s take this random gist as an example. Click on the “view raw” button. Use <include text "..."> to transclude it:

(setq abg-elisp-external-dir
      (expand-file-name "external" abg-elisp-dir))

; ...

; Add external projects to load path
(dolist (project (directory-files abg-elisp-external-dir t "\\w+"))
  (when (file-directory-p project)
    (add-to-list 'load-path project)))

Actually, I added an Emacs Wiki feature using two lines of code that add support for fancy inclusion:

<include gist "https://gist.github.com/1236665">

It only works over there, however. See EmacsWiki:Gists.

Anyway, the same also works for Lisppaste:

<include text "http://paste.lisp.org/display/134703/raw">

Results in:

;; Set XTERM resources as so
;; 
;; metaSendsEscape: false
;; altSendsEscape: false
;; eightBitInput: true

;; Verify with cat > /dev/null command that pressing alt-a
;; alt-b and so on produces single >128bit char (will look
;; like a with a hat

;; once above is working in emacs do

;; Prevent pressing esc O from triggering binding
(define-key (get-input-decode-map) "\eO" nil)

;; tell emacs Meta is 8th bit
(cond ((fboundp 'set-input-meta-mode)
      (set-input-meta-mode t))
    (t (set-input-mode t nil t)))

I don’t think there’s a nice way to include the colored version, unfortunately.

Update: I added support and minimal Lisp highlighting for the following:

<include lisppaste "http://paste.lisp.org/display/134703">

It only works over there, of course.

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2012-10-17 Traveller Maps for Campaign Wiki

Since I’m apparently going to use my Spelljammer-Planescape-Traveller map for a while, I added a way to make map display even easier on Campaign Wiki pages.

Write “Traveller:” followed by the UWP like this:

Traveller:
Tu Akhra 0404 D0602B3-1 P  As De Lo Lt R
Susrael 0503 B0604A4-1 N  As De Lt NI A
Nova Genova 0607 B867686-1 N  Ag Ga Lt NI Ri
Hinia Oot 0705 E060200-1 As De Lo Lt A
Monkey Island 0308 E064105-0 Lo Lt

And the result will be this:

Traveller and Spelljammer

Klick to switch to the map. There, you can click on the systems to get the wiki pages.

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2012-03-24 How Emacs Wiki Works

(TL;DR: People that don’t like the wiki as it is ought look at the official Emacs documentation instead. I wrote this so that I’d have something to link to in the future. This post was inspired by EmacsWiki:2012-03-20.)

Every year or so, I read about suggested changes to the Emacs Wiki. The complaints are the same, year after year.

  1. The pages are confusing.
  2. The code snippets are wrong.
  3. The site is badly organized.
  4. The information is out of date.

The solutions invariably have nothing to do with the problem.

  1. Switch to Mediawiki, the software used to run Wikipedia.
  2. Use a database or a distributed version control system as the backend.
  3. Change the text formatting rules to Markdown, Mediawiki markup, or something else that is better known.
  4. Separate discussion from the main page.
  5. Delete stuff that is outdated.
  6. Fix errors.
  7. Organize.
  8. Moderate.

Why are these suggestions not helpful?

The first problem is the mistaken belief that technology can substitute for social change. Yes, the wiki is badly organized and many of the pages are outdated. Changing the wiki engine, the backend or the formatting rules will not change this, however.

The backend used by the wiki engine can influence performance and resource use, it can the software harder or easier to maintain and backup – but it will not induce somebody to edit a messy page and fix it.

The second problem is the mistaken belief that moderation can be commanded. You can complain about bad editing and a lack of moderation all day. But since nobody is paying people to do a boring job, we must rely on obsessive compulsive people to fix typos and tag pages.

Maybe we could attract more people by gamifying the experience—offer rewards, badges, scores. But Stack Overflow already does this. It’s the best social question answering machine currently known. The wiki doesn’t need to imitate something better. The wiki needs to do what it does best. We’ll come to that.

The third problem is the mistaken belief that quality control and volunteers go well together. Just compare Wikipedia and Citizendium and consider the animosity generated by Deletionism on Wikipedia. How will you encourage authors to contribute if you are telling them that their contributions are lacking the quality you are looking for instead of simply accepting their text and working on it?

You fight spam, you rework text occasionally, you encourage others, you welcome newbies, you lead by example. That’s how you lead.

An abrasive personality, radical change involving a lot of work—those are not the tools you are looking for.

Let me return to the issue of commanding change. Things people have said:

“the content editing should be one with the goal of creating a comprehensive, coherent, article that gives readers info or tutorial about the subject.” – Xah Lee (2008)
“I favor a major reorganization of the wiki material.” – Neil Smithline (2011)
“The articles are littered with crappy advice confusing beginners, have little structure and are filled with ridiculous questions” – Bozhidar Batsov (2012)

The critics can be unhappy about it all they want, and they can complain about it all they want—but in the end, one needs to understand the forces at work, here. There is no chain of command.

It works just like a free software project. If it doesn’t scratch someone’s itch, nobody is going to add it. I think it’s a fundamental issue with our business model: there is no pay for boring stuff. Plus, documentation is of no direct use for anything—unlike code. Thus, people are mostly motivated to keep their own code and its documentation up to date. I don’t think there is anything we can do about that. That’s why the Emacs Wiki Mission Statement does not mention organization and quality. It cannot be commanded.

Once we accept that this is the sand upon which we are building our house, we necessarily need to scale down our expectations. Personally, I think the wiki exists somewhere between the official documentation, Stack Overflow, the FAQ, the newsgroups, the mailing lists, and IRC. It’s certainly nowhere near the quality of organization and writing that the Emacs documentation has—and I don’t think this is the right medium to aim for this level of quality. I think the people willing to invest that amount of energy to write quality stuff ought to be writing the real Emacs documentation—and they probably are.

What remains are the people using Emacs Wiki for their own pet projects, questions asked, answers given, sometimes organized, sometimes rewritten, sometimes linked to the rest of the site.

Wikipedia works because of its universal appeal. When I added an image to an obscure Indian temple we visited when I was staying in Mysore, the photo was terrible. But it was a start, and enough people cared about the page and it grew, and it found people to tend it, and now it’s big and beautiful.

There just aren’t enough Emacs users and authors out there and the best of us will be contributing to the official Emacs documentation. The wiki exists somewhere between the official documentation and the mailing lists. Lower your expectations.

Given all that, why does the wiki exist at all?

When I started it, I had several reasons:

  1. The wikis I knew, C2 and Meatball Wiki, had attracted a particular community and they had created a particular subculture I liked. We talked about the Wiki Now and many other things that made wikis work. The medium itself was interesting.
  2. I had been posting on the newsgroups for a long time, and slowly I realized that the same questions kept being asked again and again. The newsgroups and mailing lists were failing as a medium because they were ephemeral. Sure, we kept telling people to search the archives. But the medium afforded asking questions instead of searching.
  3. When I looked for Frequently Asked Questions, I found a document online, maintained by a single person. This person was a bottleneck. The FAQ updated slowly.
  4. At the time I was getting into Internet Relay Chat. On IRC, conversation is even more ephemeral than on the mailing list. This time, however, “searching the archives” was out of the question. We needed our own archive. And thus I started answering questions on IRC and posting the answers on the wiki.

I think this last point bears consideration: I was creating pages or adding information to pages because it was pertinent on IRC. An index, linking to the page, categorization, returning to the page later and reworking it, all these quality related tasks were not pertinent on IRC. All I needed was a pastebin that I could go back to and rewrite if I felt like it. Often I did not—and I still don’t.

The wiki being on the web, updated every now and then, with pertinent answers to specialized questions, unorganized and raw, ended up being a good resource for the search engines out there. These search engines bring new people to the site. People that don’t understand how wikis work in general and how this wiki grew to be where it is in particular. They are shocked. So many pages outdated! Such a mess in style and quality!

I think those people are better served reading the official documentation. They don’t want this mess, they don’t benefit from it’s loose rules, they don’t understand how cool it is to have a site with no login required. They are better served elsewhere.

I’m sure that one day the Emacs Wiki will have become irrelevant. But just like the old newsgroups never disappeared entirely, so will the wiki transform into something else and remain part of our information landscape.

Perhaps one of the Emacs Wiki critics will one day set up an alternate site, pull all the pages (more than 8500 pages last time I checked), extract the quality content—or rewrite it from scratch—and produce something better.  Perhaps they will build an organization that can keep the quality up, encourage new authors to join, provide more value to their readers. But I don’t think complaining about the existing Emacs Wiki is a step in the right direction. Build it, and they will come—elsewhere.

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Comments on 2012-03-24 How Emacs Wiki Works


SeanO

> the mistaken belief that technology can substitute for social change

Well, simply having a “talk” page for each wiki page (with a big link at the top) would let people have conversations about those pages without cluttering them up. And having an actual, complete revision history would help someone figure out what happened to a completely messed-up page. But EmacsWiki doesn’t seem to have those things. Its technology is too primitive to reasonably support – much less encourage – a workable society.

> the mistaken belief that moderation can be commanded

As Wikipedia has amply demonstrated, there are plenty of obsessive-compulsive people online. If anything, moderation needs to be limited.

SeanO 2012-03-24 03:44 UTC



Bozhidar
One of the critics already started an alternative wiki - http://wikemacs.org :-)

Other than that - I’m with SeanO on this one. And with 8500 pages or so - it easier to save the worthwhile articles than to revisit all the material.

Bozhidar 2012-03-24 05:48 UTC



AlexSchroeder
Sean, if the lack of a complete revision history is what held you back from reworking and reorganizing, then I guess you’re right. I am keeping all the logs, but discarding all the older revisions after two weeks and never felt the lack.

The addition of Talk pages was discussed a while ago—it was one of the items on the suggestions page—but at the time we had two votes in favor and two votes against them. Nobody else seemed to care. I’ll be surprised if their mere existence improves the pages. But I guess we’ll see, now. Good luck to you all!

After a quick look at the site I’ll suggest that you should add licensing terms as quickly as possible. As it stands, you cannot copy anything from Emacs Wiki. That would require a copyleft license.

AlexSchroeder 2012-03-24 07:16 UTC



SeanO
Alex – I’d say my laziness and your sneering condescension were greater obstacles. But if I don’t check in for more than 2 weeks (quite likely, given how little time I have for Emacs these days), I’d still like to be able to see what happened if something I cared about (e.g. the Perl page or my homepage) went bad. (How much, to an order of magnitude Euros and hours’ work, would it cost you to keep a complete revision log, by the way?)

I guess the Talk page issue came and went in a revision window when I didn’t have time to hang out here.

I’m also tired of your pseudo-legal threats toward the content of the wiki (which is under GPL2, not GFDL).

(This comment is protected by the GFDL, I guess. Whatever that means.)

SeanO 2012-03-24 08:14 UTC



AlexSchroeder
I wonder where you felt my sneering condescension. Perhaps in my replies to people I felt were trying to tell me what to do in my free time and with my money? I also don’t think I threatened you in any way. Perhaps you missed the problems I had with changes to the Emacs Wiki license in its early days. I was trying to help you or Bozhidar make the same mistake.

The logs are there for all to see if you follow the links. Here’s the the SiteMap history, for example. Keeping all the old revisions would cost me nothing – it’s simply a setting. I prefer it this way. As I said, I think keeping the old revisions provides no benefit and adds a number of small drawbacks such as needing administrators to permanently hide particular revisions that contain material deemed problematic from a legal perspective. As it stands, I can undo these edits and with time, they are gone. Another issue is that I like the idea of a right to be forgotten. The original C2 wiki kept no revisions at all. I think that the only reason old revisions need to be kept at all is peer review and anti-spam and anti-vandalism measures. For those tasks, a small time window is sufficient. After all, wiki pages are not code. We don’t need to look through the history of a page to find when bugs were introduced and by whom.

AlexSchroeder 2012-03-24 10:30 UTC

P.S.: EmacsWiki:WikiDownload links to a CVS repository of the source files hosted on the wiki, a subversion repo with daily snapshots of all the wiki pages, and a new, up to date git repo of all the pages with full history. I guess in a way my preference regarding the right to be forgotten is already moot since deleted stuff can be pulled out of the archives. This just hides deleted info from casual visitors.



PhilHudson
Excellent riposte, Alex. We who criticize the wiki should pay attention. I would like to thank you for this consistently useful resource and your dedication. I certainly don’t detect any sneering on your part. Having said that, I do think there are a lot of real and fixable problems with the wiki, the worst being the hosting of code with neither “proper” SCM nor automatic notification of changes. Once you’ve used LaunchPad and (especially) github, this is just not tolerable. So I’m going to see what if anything I can do to help any new project.

PhilHudson 2012-03-24 11:29 UTC



AlexSchroeder
I see the problem! I think people like me don’t feel bad about keeping code that consists of a single file on the wiki because we usually don’t think of these files as requiring maintenance. After all, that’s how gnu.emacs.sources used to work. The wiki has the benefit of providing a stable URL, but the process remains essentially the same: post & forget, possibly have discussions with other people via email, followed by another post & forget.

To me, creating a separate project on Savannah or Source Forge is an unacceptable overhead for files like EmacsWiki:rcirc-color.el or EmacsWiki:rcirc-controls.el. But if somebody else felt like taking those files, putting them up on some other site – excellent! At first, color-theme.el was hosted on Emacs Wiki. Eventually somebody took it, moved it elsewhere, and started a real project. Great!

I still think that the Emacs Wiki can act as a low barrier-to-entry incubator for all those small little files that need a place on the web. I don’t read gnu.emacs.sources anymore, and I don’t think many other people do. At the same time, I think there still are a lot of people without their own web pages out there. They can’t post code on Facebook or Google+ and I imagine uploading code to Wordpress and Blogspot sites is also unwieldy. For all those people, the Emacs Wiki offers an alternative. It’s a bit better than gnu.emacs.sources and Lisppaste but a far cry from a software forge.

If people would take popular code from the wiki to a forge, repackage it as a real project, that would be great.

AlexSchroeder 2012-03-24 12:11 UTC


Phil, I just remembered EmacsWiki:Git repository. Maybe that helps? I know Jonas is very enthusiastic about it and has been pestering me for weeks when I dragged my feet. ;) I’m sure he’d appreciate help or some nice words.

AlexSchroeder 2012-03-24 19:07 UTC


“the mistaken belief that technology can substitute for social change”

Github was an example of technology that brought about a change in social behaviour.

– Phil Jackson 2012-03-26 12:18 UTC



Edward O'Connor
Excellent post, Alex. Long live the EmacsWiki! :)

Edward O'Connor 2012-03-26 23:35 UTC



AlexSchroeder
Thanks, hober!

Phil, regarding Github: I’m not much of a github user. I see that git and github bring a lot of relevant new features to the table. Compared with other version control systems they facilitate forking on a grand scale. Do you feel that using Mediawiki introduces a similar set of new features that will revolutionize how wiki pages are edited and organized? I don’t see it, which is why I cannot imagine that Xah’s and Bozhidar’s idea of switching to Mediawiki will in fact help solve the quality issues they have with Emacs Wiki.

AlexSchroeder 2012-03-28 15:32 UTC



AlexSchroeder
Just saw this: The Wikemacs Experiment: 300 Days Later.

AlexSchroeder 2013-01-22 11:57 UTC

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2012-03-13 Campaign Wikis

Recently Calithena of Fight On asked on Dragonsfoot: Do any of you have your campaigns on line?

I said:

  • Ymir’s Call – I play every other Monday evening in a Barbarians of Lemuria campaign with DM Florian. Last session we switched to Crypts & Things. German campaign wiki.
  • Hagfish Tavern was the D&D 3.5 adventure path Rise of the Runelords we played before Ymir’s Call.
  • Kurobano And The Dragons was the M20 game that switched to D&D 3.5 before we started Hagfish Tavern.
  • The Alder King – I run a Solar System game set in the Wilderlands of High Fantasy on two Sunday afternoons a month, in German. This campaign used D&D 3.5 and English before we switched to Solar System RPG. Right now it’s on a short hiatus as we give the Great Pendragon Campaign a try for two or three sessions. I’ve heard one player mumble that maybe we should try it for a bit longer, though.
  • Durgan’s Flying Circus – I play in a monthly Harp game with GM Stefan on another Sunday each month.
  • Desert Raiders was the Pathfinder RPG adventure path Legacy of Fire we played before Durgan’s Flying Circus.
  • The Golden Lanterns was the D&D 3.5 adventure path Shackled City we played before Desert Raiders.
  • Fünf Winde– I run a Labyrinth Lord game set in the Wilderlands of High Fantasy on one Tuesday each month. I used to run two separate groups in the same campaign area, but ended up merging the two groups because one of the two kept shrinking. Both in German.
  • Wilderlande – I run a Labyrinth Lord campaign set in a Points of Light campaign setting for my best friend and his three kids for two hours on a Friday evening every month. Also in German.
  • Lied vom Eis is a Song of Ice and Fire RPG campaign I used to play in; mostly in German.
  • Die Reise nach Rhûn was a Rolemaster campaign in Middle Earth that switched to Legends of Middle Earth we played before Lied vom Eis. German.

There’s more… There must be at least two short Burning Wheel campaigns on that site (Burning Six, Campaign:Krythos). And a Mongoose Traveller game that switched to Diaspora (Campaign:Kaylash). And a wiki I used for my DM notes when running the Kurobano campaign (Campaign:Attaxa). And a Forgotten Realms campaign using D&D 3.5 (Sohn des schwarzen Marlin). And another D&D 3.5 sandbox (Campaign:Grenzmarken).

I totally recommend keeping notes online! :D

(I run the Campaign Wiki site which explains why I’m so enthusiastic about it.)

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2011-07-15 Campaign Wiki in Italian

Today I noticed an Italian speaking woman commenting on somebody else’s RPG related post on Google+. That got me thinking. Do Italian speaking gamers have a Campaign Wiki site?

I posted on Google+ that I’m interested in hosting a translation, but that I’d need help. I’ve translated the Campaign Wiki site to German, and a handful of people from the German Tanelorn forum picked it up and started using it. Awesome! My guess is that there are still enough people that need a wiki and that are willing to settle for a no-thrills version instead of using Obsidian Portal or Epic Words. I assume those two are English-only services?

Francesco Beltramini was kind enough to do a few translations. And it works!

Con questo sito vogliamo darvi l’opportunità di creare un wiki per le vostre compagne di gioco di ruolo.

Scrivi il nome della tua campagna nello spazio sottostante e fai una prova. Oppure dai un occhiata agli altri siti passando per la pagina Stato.

If you speak Italian, give it a look! It’s work in progress but I’ll be adding all the translations you send me. :)

There are various parts to such a translation effort:

  1. the most important pages need to be translated such as CW:Pagina principale, CW:A proposito, CW:Info (Italian)
  2. the wiki software needs to an update to it’s list of translation strings (CW:Italian Translation)
  3. the configuration used for the Campaign Wiki site also uses words that need to be translated – such as Home Page → Pagina principale and so on.
  4. the site needs to be used by Italian speakers such that all the missing translations get spotted and fixed

The last point is particularly important for long term success. The French translation of Campaign Wiki, for example did not attract any users at all. None of the wikis (CW:Status) are French. Perhaps the French have their own sites that provide them with wikis or this is a cultural thing? I have no idea.

If you are a French gamer, please let me know! :)

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2011-02-01 Campaign Wiki auf Französisch

Wenn ich mir die aktiven Wikis auf dem Campaign Wiki anschaue, scheint mir, dass die meisten Wikis Deutsch sind. Zuerst war ich überrascht. Liegt es an einer anderem ästhetischen Empfinden oder an einem fehlenden deutschsprachigen Angebot? Die Alternativen Obsidian Portal und Epic Words sehen beide besser aus und bieten mehr Funktionalitäten – sind aber entweder kostenpflichtig oder im Funktionsumfang reduziert, wenn ich mich recht erinnere.

Selbst wenn es nur die Tatsache wäre, dass Campaign Wiki auf Deutsch erhältlich ist, so gilt dennoch zu bedenken, wie viele Punkte es noch gibt, die nicht übersetzt wurden. Per Default gibt es im Menü beispielsweise eine “About” Seite; die Startseite ist nur auf Englisch vorhanden, überhaupt alle von dort direkt verlinkten Seiten wie “Status”, “Advanced”, “Setup” und “Migration” sind alle nur auf Englisch vorhanden – traurig aber wahr!

Da das wenige deutsche Material aber anscheinend ausreicht, habe ich mit Google Translate, LEO und Resten von Schulfranzösisch mich an die Übersetzung der französischen Hilfeseite gemacht. Zudem habe ich noch ein paar Texte für die französische Oddmuse-Übersetzung nachgetragen. Mal schauen ob es was nützt!

Wessen Schulfranzösisch besser ist als das meine, und wer einen altruistischen Impuls verspürt, den will ich gerne einladen, mir bei der Übersetzung zu helfen! :)

Schande über mich, bin ich doch halber Franzose und kann meine eigene Muttersprache nicht…

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2011-01-06 Campaign Wikis Are Belong To Us

I use a campaign wiki for every single campaign I’m in. There are several solutions out there:

  1. I use my own Campaign Wiki site. It’s simple and sturdy. It doesn’t have many features. I wrote the code, I run the server. Feel free to give it a try, or look at existing campaigns.
  2. Obsidian Portal is a fancy commercial service by a bunch of very nice guys that sponsored prizes for the One Page Dungeon Contest. I recommend them for people that like lots of features.
  3. Epic Words is another service I heard about on the Roll For Initiative podcast.

What are the benefits of using a wiki for your campaign?

  • Players create a page for their character, thus allowing others to review stats and background. This makes it easier to integrate characters into adventures.
  • Players can add background and describe what their characters are doing between adventures. This can help focus game sessions themselves on group activities including combat and still promote immersion by encouraging character development between sessions.
  • Pages created for new locations can develop over time. They start with nothing but a rumor and grow links to important characters and other locations.
  • Session reports can be as short as a sentence or two if your game is focused on fighting and looting, or they can be reports a page or two long, allowing the report writers to add character and emotional depths to the events. This will get players up to speed if they missed a session or if you’re not playing every single week.
  • In a sandbox game, providing rumors and incentives for your players is imperative. Creating pages for locations and characters is just that. Instead of providing rumors at the table, the slow growth of the campaign mimics the in-game knowledge of player characters.

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2010-12-10 Wikileaks and the Transparent Society

Currently Wikileaks is doing the United States diplomatic cables leak. At the same time, Julian Assange was arrested on rape charges, and companies like Paypal, Mastercard, VISA, and Swiss Postfinance kicked out Wikileaks. Shame on them!

All of this seems to be the world adjusting to a coming Transparent Society. This is also a book by David Brin where he argues that currently those with lots of resources have the means to invade your privacy, that in the old days there was very little privacy, that therefore privacy was maybe a doomed concept, and what sort of alternative would we want. The transparent society is a society where privacy is lost in both directions. Not only can you spy on other people using public cameras – other people will also be able to see that you spied on them. Hopefully that would level the field somewhat.

As companies are spying on us as we surf the web using cookies such as the Evercookie, javascript, and prepared Flash animations; as governments force providers to keep logs of our online activities; as biometric data in our passports keep invading our privacy, we adapt. We don’t mind. But we presume to look back at the big corporations, to leak their secrets, to expose their corruption, their double speak, their lies.

I’m with Wikileaks.

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Comments on 2010-12-10 Wikileaks and the Transparent Society

Ich auch … dann könntest du ja auch den Link vom Kopp-Verlag so weit und so oft es geht veröffentlichen. Ich habe nicht die rede dafür. Es muss herausgefunden werden, ob die 2 Mädels für ihre aussagen bezahlt werden, oder ob Assange sich wirklich falsch benommen hat. Denn diese Sache bringt ihn hinter Gitter, nicht unbedingt Wikilieaks ;).

– mama 2010-12-12 13:33 UTC


Naomi Wolf on rape, justice and Julian Assange – sad in its own right. :(

– Alex

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2010-11-05 The Wiki Nature of This Blog

I recently saw an essay by SamRose, linked to from Community:InformationOverload: Why you never see people complaining about “knowledge overload”…

  1. “Your ability to track, read, digest and understand blog posts cannot match the exponential volume of blogs emerging on the internet every day (even just in the subject areas that you are interested in).”
  2. “[I]f your intent is to be a source of re-usable knowledge, then focusing on frequency of posting, and statistics of people looking at your web or blogsite could become difficult to sustain.”
  3. “A more sustainable approach for digesting, understanding, and sharing for the 80% of people who will not be one of the widely-followed blogs, is to do it in a form that others can digest, understand, and share.”

It makes me want return to writing wiki pages on this site instead of blog pages (like this one). Start with a copy of a good blog page on a topic, copy it to a page without date prefix, and integrate other good pages instead of just appending to them (like the tag or category pages will).

On the topic of my RPG-related blogging, I have a few things that I keep returning to:

  1. My current set of house-rules, somewhat collected on House Rules
  2. The underpinnings of my play style, somewhat collected on How I Roll
  3. There’s also a much longer German page describing what I like as a player, 2010-03-01 Spielervorlieben
  4. The underpinnings of my referee style, somewhat collected on Know Your DM
  5. A wide variety of pages on the abstract idea of writing short texts, currently collected on Keep It Short

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Comments on 2010-11-05 The Wiki Nature of This Blog

I personally like the wiki nature of this blog very much, and if dropping the date prefix makes you happier, more power to you! Just keep the RSS feed, please (-;

– Harald Wagener 2010-11-05 18:18 UTC


Hehe, thanks. I think what I meant was that when I started this site, it was just a wiki. Then I wrote some code to add blogging functionality (mostly comment pages, RSS feeds limited to the DatePages, that kind of stuff). And then I slowly started to write more and more blog pages instead of wiki pages.

What’s the difference, you might ask. For me personally, wiki pages – having no temporal context – basically stand in a permanent WikiNow. When a reader comes accross the wiki page, the page says “this is what I say and I’m saying it right now” instead of “this is what Alex thought years and years ago and who knows whether he cares anymore”. I guess the implicit assumption is a wiki audience that will keep rereading the existing pages, questioning them, putting them back into context… Thus, maybe what I’m saying about the Wiki Now is just a dream that won’t work on a one person wiki.

There’s also the question of DocumentsVsMessages raised by LionKimbro, and WikiIsDocumentBased in particular.

Hm, food for thought.

AlexSchroeder 2010-11-05 20:54 UTC


Yes, this is why blogs can be damaging in communities if there is no Wiki alternative. Even popular software communities suffer if they rely only on the hype of their bloggers and don’t promote a community-driven Wiki. It can be hard to find the blog entry with the example you want with Web search, and even quality entries can become poor style or useless with time or after a new release of the software. The comment section of blog entries try to make up for it with people submitting corrections, but there’s only so much you can “fit in the margins”.

AaronHawley 2010-11-09 22:23 UTC


Interesting – I’ve been thinking the exact same thing for my blog/wiki. My intent for some time now has been to write stub blog entries, and then expand them into full pages. But I almost never go back and do that… so I just end up with sort of half-thoughts that are never expanded upon.

awwaiid 2010-12-12 20:47 UTC

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