C2 wiki closed for remodeling
c2.com
c2.com
So why close? It gives me room to work. The continuous scraping bumps up
against my web throttling making all other web services useless. Even
shell is painfully slow.
So I guess another reason for closing the old wiki could be to take advantage of the news this generate to recruit people for this (new? old?) conversion effort.
It does sound like he needs a better QoS or bandwidth limiting mechanism though.
Running public services on my personal server ... is very old-school, but it gives me the heeby geebies to think of doing it now.
Hardware is cheap cheap cheap. The major cost is in administering it.
Multi-homing onto fully independent networks could be quite useful.
"shell" means SSH, not the local shell.
>
> Federation supports what Cunningham has described as "a chorus of voices" where users share content but maintain their individual perspectives.[3] This approach contrasts with the tendency of centralized wikis such as Wikipedia to function as consensus engines.[4]
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallest_Federated_Wiki
In short I guess if I disagree with a page instead of editing it and starting an edit-war I can fork it.
Which I'd expect to lead to less of a "chorus" and more of a cacophony of voices as every disputed change, every contentious rewrite, leads to another fork of the original.
Merging software branches can be hard enough. Merging "forks" of English text is horrendous, and gets worse the further the forks are from each other. There's a good reason why no commonly used wiki software has this functionality: it's completely impractical to use.
I would expect the same dynamics to be true here - yes, there will be plenty of short-lived forks, but hardly anyone will actually notice them; and community will effectively "bless" one fork, or maybe a few major forks for particularly debated issues, as the official one, and that's what most people will see, and where most activity will take place.
Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. It's the only way to make progress. -- Vetinari
So why close? It gives me room to work. The continuous
scraping bumps up against my web throttling making all
other web services useless. Even shell is painfully
slow.
Of course I live in a world of many options. I could be
stalled just reviewing choices. Instead I build on
what I've learned from federated wiki so as to preserve
the original wiki in a form that can be appreciated for
what it has been and will ever be. If you want to help.
Learn some federated wiki. Then email me.Edit: turns out this was already the case. What I really want to say is that we should respect Ward Cunningham's choices in maintaining the site how he wants, in whatever way works for him.
This is an unhealthy attitude and I'm continually surprised that people say things like this. Having respect for someone does not mean that they are above criticism. It doesn't mean silent obedience. You can respect someone and still say, "hey, this thing you're doing is a bad idea."
The attitude that actually is unhealthy is when someone graciously provides a service to the community for years, and then stops doing that, and people whine as though they are entitled to the continuation of that service.
Respect in cases like this should mean to appreciate the work done to keep the thing running until now, and if someone decides to stop doing that work, respect that choice, even if you don't understand it or agree with it.
I don't think it counts as "whining" to ask if there is another way (e.g. switch to static content) to address Cunningham's concerns/costs without outright taking the wiki down.
In no way do I think Cunningham owes the community continued indefinite hosting of the wiki. At the same time, its removal is a loss to the community and it's unsurprising that some would ask if this could be handled differently.
It does not. An alternative explanation: We recognize him as an autonomous adult who does not owe us anything. We trust that if he wants our advice, he will ask us for it.
Ward Cunningham has a long track record of doing very smart things. I met him a number of times at the early conferences, and he was consistently sharp, kind, and generous with his time.
To criticize his decisions about what he does with his own stuff is a level of presumption that I would be unlikely to indulge in. Just because I don't understand what he's doing doesn't mean he doesn't understand.
Either respect means we shut up when we disagree or it doesn't. You can't claim that respect doesn't mean we should shut up and then claim that we should shut up in this case ... because of our respect for Ward Cunningham.
And I'd like to be super clear that Ward Cunningham doesn't owe me anything and if he wants to turn off his wiki and burn the archives that's his business and I actually don't care too much and I wish him all the best regardless. What I don't like is this frequent assertion that criticizing someone's actions implies a lack of respect, or conversely that respect implies silence in the face of disagreement.
If you complain in a way that you are setting yourself up as judge and jury (a common mode here on HN), then yes, I'd rather you put a sock in it. Ward's a smart guy, he knows more about the topic than you, and he's spent much more time thinking about it. Truly respecting that eliminates certain kinds of critique.
Note that this doesn't stop you from commenting. If you would like to mention your feelings in non-judgmental ways, that's fine. E.g., "I'm worried: what will happen to the archives?" Or "I don't understand how he will solve problem X." It also doesn't prevent you from expressing different values, as long as you respect his values.
But you are only competent to disagree with his decision once you have as much information as he does and has put a similar level of thought into it. Otherwise you're one of those people who froths at a trial outcome without actually looking at the trial record and carefully reading the judge's decision. Not all opinions are equally valuable. If I suggest my ignorant opinion is just as good as somebody else's informed one, I am unavoidably being disrespectful to them.
I'm happy to recognize the middle ground where someone can effectively just be whining and have nothing useful to say, and the appropriate thing to do is just shut up. That middle ground has nothing to do with respect though, which gets back to my point.
Certainly I agree that the way a concern is voiced has a major impact on how it will be received.
> But you are only competent to disagree with his decision once you have as much information as he does and has put a similar level of thought into it. Otherwise you're one of those people who froths at a trial outcome without actually looking at the trial record and carefully reading the judge's decision. Not all opinions are equally valuable. If I suggest my ignorant opinion is just as good as somebody else's informed one, I am unavoidably being disrespectful to them.
Absolutely not. This is a terribly unhealthy attitude. By this logic, you can virtually never question someone's choice because you effectively never know everything that goes into someone else's choice. This is yes man logic that leads to an echo chamber. Less charitably, this is apologist behavior. This is the argument put forward to defend every shady government decision in history. "Oh, you don't have all the information so you can't have an opinion on the issue."
What you should be doing in a situation where you disagree but don't feel well informed is to become well informed so that you can either defend your position or understand the decision.
I said "complicated". You took that to mean a continuum, but that's not the case. There is more than one dimension here.
> By this logic, you can virtually never question someone's choice because you effectively never know everything that goes into someone else's choice.
You were talking criticism. Here you have shifted ground to questioning. Which is still a little entitled, honestly. You could ask questions, though.
Also, your parallel to government decisions is ridiculous. Government is of, by, and for the people. People have a right to know. Ward Cunningham, on the other hand, is of, by, and for Ward Cunningham. You have no right to get up in his business.
> What you should be doing in a situation where you disagree but don't feel well informed is to become well informed so that you can either defend your position or understand the decision.
Yes, and I for one wish you had done that here instead of pitching a fit.
But ultimately, Ward doesn't owe us an explanation. If he chooses to inform us, that's great. But if not, the respectful thing to do is to, absent evidence to the contrary, assume he knows what he's doing.
It feels like you're trying really hard to avoid addressing the point directly. It's really not as complex as you're making it out to be. I literally posed a yes or no question about the specific example of Ward Cunningham and somehow it's now a multi-dimensional issue that you've been unable to answer?
I think your answer is "no" but for some reason you're unwilling to just say so, which is why you're bringing in other dimensions that are unrelated to respect in order to try to make the question seem difficult. If you think the commenters should shut up about Cunningham's actions because you think their complaints come from a place of ignorance or entitlement, that might be reasonable, but it's got nothing to do with respect.
> You were talking criticism. Here you have shifted ground to questioning. Which is still a little entitled, honestly. You could ask questions, though.
You're trying to nitpick semantics. To question someone's decision is to criticize it.
> Also, your parallel to government decisions is ridiculous. Government is of, by, and for the people. People have a right to know. Ward Cunningham, on the other hand, is of, by, and for Ward Cunningham. You have no right to get up in his business.
The government example was provided to illustrate why this mindset is fundamentally wrong, not to equate government actions and Cunningham's actions. I could have provided equivalent examples involving business, or friends, or strangers. But it doesn't matter because you're nitpicking the example instead of addressing the unhealthiness of the attitude.
> Yes, and I for one wish you had done that here instead of pitching a fit.
Where do you imagine I pitched a fit? Is criticism something you just fundamentally don't agree with? My comments here have been polite and, yes, respectful.
> But ultimately, Ward doesn't owe us an explanation. If he chooses to inform us, that's great. But if not, the respectful thing to do is to, absent evidence to the contrary, assume he knows what he's doing.
I never claimed he did and repeatedly stated that he didn't owe me anything. I think I made it extremely clear that I was criticizing the comments/attitude linking respect and silence, and not Cunningham's actions. (I'm not sure why you're equating whether he owes us something with whether he knows what he's doing, though. These are unrelated.)
> You're trying to nitpick semantics. To question someone's decision is to criticize it.
No, criticizing is saying the decision is bad for given reasons. Questioning it often implies the decision is bad, but needn't. Asking questions is a way of learning more about the decision. For a given level of knowledge, these demonstrate different levels of respect.
> it doesn't matter because you're nitpicking the example instead of addressing the unhealthiness of the attitude.
Some possible attitudes are unhealthy. But quite a lot of them demonstrate healthy humility and respect. Your continued insistence on collapsing all possible attitudes that result in silence into one attitude is the reason we are not getting anywhere.
> Where do you imagine I pitched a fit?
Right here. Your whole discussion here is you raising a ruckus because you imagine people must hold an a particular attitude you don't like. They don't, but you are unwilling to listen.
> I never claimed he did and repeatedly stated that he didn't owe me anything. I think I made it extremely clear that I was criticizing the comments/attitude linking respect and silence, and not Cunningham's actions.
Either you believe you are entitled to opine vigorously upon decisions you don't yet understand, or you believe the person you are criticizing is required to explain their decision to your satisfaction. Otherwise you would be able to see that not saying anything is a respectful way to deal with a decision made by someone who has more data than you and has spent longer thinking about it.
So yes, you have claimed he doesn't owe you anything. But you still act like he does.
Going a bit off the deep end here.
When you disagree but don't feel well informed, often the best thing to do is move on. There is little value in maintaining positions that don't directly bear on future actions you will personally take.
Sometimes it's not even about being well informed, it's about having another ten years of experience.
Respect is recognizing the gap between you and the one making the decision.
Respect doesn't just mean shutting up, it can mean changing your perspective or changing the weight you give to your own opinion.
No, I provided a concrete example of why the attitude is unhealthy. There are many other examples, but I picked a simple one. I assumed that it would illuminate the core point, and failed to recognize that it provided an easy way to ignore the point and criticize the example.
> When you disagree but don't feel well informed, often the best thing to do is move on. There is little value in maintaining positions that don't directly bear on future actions you will personally take.
Is ignorance really its own justification for continued ignorance?
If you disagree but don't care, the best thing is often to move on. If you disagree but care, and you're uninformed, you should become informed.
> Sometimes it's not even about being well informed, it's about having another ten years of experience.
> Respect is recognizing the gap between you and the one making the decision.
> Respect doesn't just mean shutting up, it can mean changing your perspective or changing the weight you give to your own opinion.
Respect is caring enough to give measured criticism.
Respect is knowing that they can handle the truth.
Respect is wanting to learn what they know.
(Are we done with platitudes now?)
This is why your example about governments is off-point, by the way.
I think it is safe to assume that Cunningham is familiar with the concept of static pages, and presumably has his reasons. Accepting that decision and seeing what comes of it seems better to me than all this arm-chair quarterbacking.
There's no lack of people who aren't doing the work but have strong opinions on how it should be done.
(I'm simplifiying here of course, but as long as you can get the server running, it's not hard to make a static copy.)
But yeah, it's all on archive.com: https://web.archive.org/web/20160326180126/http://c2.com/cgi...?
wayback_machine_downloader http://c2.com/cgi/wiki
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/90674827/c2.tar.gz (~109MB)
So why close? It gives me room to work. The continuous scraping bumps up against my web throttling making all other web services useless. Even shell is painfully slow.
Federated wiki is a cool idea and all, but I don't want to have to build my own wiki of everything, or decide what concepts should be included in my own wiki. The whole strength of wiki to me is that it massively multiplayer user curated content, where the whole state is determined by everyone working together. I don't know what happens to that curation if there's no authoritative source -- it seems like federated wiki isn't really wiki at all, and is something else entirely.
In the fedwiki model, you would join a neighborhood of people you trust to write good content. fedwiki has a chicken and egg problem right now - there are no good neighborhoods to join.
(Using this definition of "getting taken in": http://www.yourdictionary.com/get-taken-in )
And yes, I know it's a work in progress, and that this hasn't lead to equity of representation or systemic fairness. But still, in my view, establishing that framework and unifying je ne sais quoi in the face of such diversity is the single greatest political accomplishment of the last few hundred years.
The post explains this. Closing gives space. That could be technical, psychological, social. Shutting down what's there is cleaner. If you miss it, this would be a good chance to thank the people who kept it running all this time.
I've seen so many sites cease to exist after undertaking ambitious overhauls like this.
https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/#unico...