(2023-10-15) Schroeder Writing Alone Together

Alex Schroeder on Writing alone, together. In a way, this page is a follow-up to Wiki culture and The potential of interaction. (2023-10-11-SchroederWikiCulture, collaboration)

Looking at the blogging world these days, or the ideas of Federated Wiki, it seems that people would love to freely draw inspiration from other texts they read – and integrate them into their own texts. Read, copy, integrate.

Notice that technology and software no longer show up in the list above. From what I can tell, we don’t need tech to enable this. We already have a world where we can “read, copy, integrate.” What we need is a shared understanding of copyright. Namely, we need to understand that if we’re not authors trying to sell our works but people living a life in text and trying to grow as people, then we don’t need the benefits of copyright. (amateur, sense-making)

I was trying to think of other ways to collaborate. One idea I had goes back to how the very first encyclopedia was written. At least I think that is how it was written. Somebody has a project, like Diderot’s Encyclopédie, and farms out the individual articles. Similarly, somebody collecting design patterns like Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language could group them and farm out groups like “design patterns for roads”

The very first wiki was the Portland Pattern Repository (Ward's Wiki) and it did not work like that. You could contribute a pattern by creating a page, and everybody could edit everybody else’s pages and create more pages at will and the result was novel and exciting and a game changer but the result was not a pattern repository. The result was in a different category altogether.

So this is what interests me right now: How to collaborate with strangers in a wiki page, but without going all-in on the wiki concept, without having Wikipedia as the goal. Could we collaborate by thinking up a number of pages and articles that need to get written, assign them, and then collaborate, pick, decide, manage, distribute, and write?