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| Re: CMS by Zseni 08/03/2004, 6:09pm PDT | ||||
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jeep wrote:Zseni wrote: Yes, just so. I was looking at all the packages available. My vision of course is to have maximal functionality and complication, setting the bar for entry so insanely high nobody would actually want to leap over it, thus leaving my little dream intact and free of human interference. Also: maximal self-frustration. What I really wanted essentially was to relieve posters of a singular role and identity: posting, under the guise of a poster. In its place, I make them all editors, proofreaders, and information architects as well as posters. I also wanted to relieve posting of its two-dimensional railroad track: the unedited post and thread progressing chronologically and bound by the continuity of the thread form. This is replaced by free editing, accompanied by complete logs of all changes, conversations that branch into any direction and freely becoming new threads with the luxury of all the cross-references to old material and none of the pileup of post title debris at the bottom of each post, hidey-holes created and the weirdness of some loopy dude ressurecting ancient threads to bump down new ones removed. It all becomes a seamless manifold of user activity. Example: I make a pretentious post about oncology. Someone comes along and edits my post, adding links to an online dictionary for the words (in my post) "epistemological" and "concanreous", showing that one word is used incorrectly and the other fails to exist at all. I edit the words out, someone edits them back in and adds a brief confession of my ignorance. Someone else sets a post category: Zseni's Vocabulary Mistakes. The next time I write a post with a word over three syllables long, it gets dropped instantly into that category. The art of beleaguering someone with their prior mistakes, once the provenance of post-hunters and google dorks, becomes commonplace and excellent. Example: someone posts a positive review of System Shock 2. Fabio edits the post directly, turning the original review into a point-counterpoint article. The author replies in kind. In the "article chatter" subpage, Creex and INC are posting long logs at each new development about whether they could, if they searched the whole world over, find someone who cares. Someone else cuts the funny bits out of the logs and posts them to a new article, which is then classed under Funny Bits From Creex/INC Logs, a subcategory of Funny Bits From Creex Logs, a subcategory of Funny Bits From AIM Logs, a subcategory of Funny Bits. Creex immediately posts to the Funny Bits article about those logs, recopying all the logs in their entirety because they are all inherently funny. But of course I don't think anything should develop in that direction. Just that it could develop in that direction. I want very much to see how the information organizes itself when, relieved of the thread structure, nothing is actually offtopic or nonsequitur, and relieved of the stony gaze of the preview/post duality, all changes can be made without damaging the originals in the slightest. New rule: no more ether before posting. It doesn't really give you magic points back, and it makes your shit all silly. I'm not going to let you lord your knowledge over me like that. Lots of good bits about features and laws and etc. Yeah, and I'm sure it will end up that way, but I want to see how fast it gets there if it does get there at all. wikipedia is a nightmare. I think my hosting deal with Chet is 'no porn,' and for the most part I've stuck to that. On the one hand I'm in the Chet camp where I think editing your posts is a sign of weakness, but on the other hand it's really, really tough to have edits for anonymous posters and block people from editing themselves simultaneously. It may be impossible. I think the wikipedia change archive annihilates the power of the edit post fuction as we know it. Because all the changes are noted, all the changed documents kept, editing doesn't remove a mistake - it just puts another layer on top of it. The act of editing remains a sign of weakness but it's permitted! So people can be weak! But also still on the cross for whatever the original fuckup was. Whole flame wars can be revised for clarity by people who just can't let the thing go, or profusely illuminated by mst3k-ish commentary and footnotes by third parties, but at each turn every time you push the "post" button that post is there for everyone to see, permanently. All you can affect is the post that is first seen by someone looking for that article. Each "article" gets several levels of growth in wikipedia format: 1. the "chatter" page, a strictly chronologically linear "guestbook"-style affair 2. the edit history, containing all copies of documents resulting from posted edits of the original article (and the original article itself) 3. the actual article, the thing first displayed under the article title and the most recently edited version of the article 4. the article categories - like wikipedia's Liberalism series or its Great Western Philosophers series which cross over each other and into categories like political science, philosophy, various histories and biographies, etc. It's vast, and maybe Ray is (cynically, as usual) right in that there isn't the user base sufficient to fill up all that space, but I think that a site like that lends itself to much more than video game reviewing and, while complex and foreign, it does open the door for users to individually define their own subsections of the Caltrops empire - as though everyone here were suddenly able to create forums, edit posts, and make rules which they must enforce themselves. Like everyone were suddenly an admin, except without the IP logs. |
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