Who Writes Wikipedia?
Discord
I am about to go to bed but personally I favor the model of the federated wiki, that the same "term" or page title in the case of the wiki has many possible realizations, and what's useful is their multiplicity. I think everything2 was an early model of this, but basically it cuts to the core of the history of early wikis, to the initial fork of ward's wiki into meatball. the singularity of meaning as implied by Wikipedia is imo an artifact of wikis having been adopted by encyclopedists, with all the diderot-like enlightenment-era philosophy that entails. this seems exceptionally apt today and yesterday given Aaron Swartz telling of that history , particularly his "Who Writes Wikipedia?" Everyone can contribute in a linked context, and that's what the synthesis of wikilike thinking, linked data, and distributed messaging gives us :). I write about this idea more completely here: https://jon-e.net/infrastructure/#the-wiki-way after my take on the critical/ethical need for forking in information systems as given by the case study of NIH's biomedical translator (link to most relevant part in the middle of the argument, the justification and motivation precedes it): https://jon-e.net/infrastructure/#problematizing-the-need-for-a-system-intended-to-link-all-or-eve