rethinking the link: social jargon - Ward Cunningham presentation

rethinking the link

Ward Cunningham

@ward

AboutUs.com

• Ward is the inventor of the wiki: the Portland Pattern Repository. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki 
• What they’ve implemented in Ruby on Rails and Javascript
• What is a link?
• Something to click that takes you somewhere
• a relation to resources : Ray Fielding (inventor of the wiki)
• is a link that goes where broken?
• Not necessarily: as wiki proved
• so Ray Fielding says a link is “a relation to resources, possibly zero”
• wiki turns the zero case into an invitation
• a link that doesn’t go anywhere is an invitation to author that topic.
• wikipedia wisely color coded the link: a red link doesn’t go anywhere, a blue one does.
• It’s pretty hard to find a red link these days on wikipedia: it’s been so successful that virtually every topic has been written about.
• bringing the state of destination page to the link avoided the dreaded “under construction” on to-be-developed pages.
• two kinds of links
• internal links: essentially a query to see if the page exists
• external links: aren’t checked
• it means every page is dynamic: even if you don’t expect the page itself to change, the state of the links can change.
• extending the wiki color code
• blue link means one (links to exactly one place)
• red link means zero (nothing there, we have to write it)
• orange link means many (have to choose)
• there are 30,000 disambiguation pages on wikipedia.
• there are people whose whole contribution to wikipedia is disambiguating terms
• happy collision / happy accident
• originally wiki (Portland Pattern Repository) was 30,000 pages on a single topic: how to go about doing computer programming
• a happy collision is when you write a WikiWord expecting to see a question mark (indicating that the page wasn’t written), but it is a blue link (the topic is already written about.)
• sister sites
• pretty early on, other sites on related topics started up.
• “let’s share our names”
• what is the Japanese word for “glitch”?
• social jargon
• part one: you have a glossary of words you use: not every word, but words you use that not everyone knows, but you want them to know.
• part two: your writing automatically links to words in your glossary. (no special brackets or action needed)
• part three: your readers learn your words automatically
• part four: your words spread friend to friend as they are used
• when someone else uses a word, it gets added to their glossary
• social jargon is a feature of AboutUs.com
• AboutUs:
• Community generated content about domains: an expanded version of whois.
• People don’t want to write encyclopedia articles
• So they focus on micro-summaries. A single sentence.
• The purpose of social jargon is to add precision to concise summaries:
• Example: “JiveSoftware moves its HQ from Portland to the Bay Area”. 
• What do they mean by Portland? Portland Oregon? Portland Maine? Portland Cement? By detecting it and disambiguating on the fly with a glossary, then others can know that Portland, Oregon is meant.
• It allows people to be casually precise. In a world where we want to write less and have it mean more.
• is it important? are names important?
• “The dominating feature in the [energetic neutral atom Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) all-sky maps] at low energies is the hydrogen, helium, and oxygen interstellar gas flow.
• super long noun: many words used to achieve full precision. 
• it’s a natural human feature to compress and utilize context to fill in the gaps. 
• context, adjectives, and syntax are all normally used to help achieve precision...
• context: “it was a dark and stormy night”
• adjectives: “energetic neutral atom”
• syntax: “meeting @ward at #wv2010”
• interaction helps:
• “By wiki, did you mean Portland Pattern Repository or collaborative software?”
• Give it a try on AboutUs.com
• The future of writing
• Wikipedia has had a tremendous impact on writing.
• And a tremendous impact on linguistics who have something to study that is properly licensed and has a full history.
• Texting trend: short messages
• Social trend: context for everything.
• We want to use the computer and language in a way similar to our colleagues and friends. 
• Tapping trend: favors choosing over typing. (e.g. better to write something short, and be able to choose the precision than to have to write something long and precise using an iPhone keyboard.)
• Impact...
• accelerated evolution of language: it will be easier for new words and concepts to propagate rapidly.
• specialize language used freely: when you find that existing words don’t work, you’ll make up new words
• hard to read offline: you’ll be able to read further from your comfort zone because you’ll be able to look up words as you go.