taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

This post on the Wikipedia/Seigenthaler spat at Corante.com contains this excellent comment from Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales:

Imagine that we are designing a restaurant. This restuarant will serve steak. Because we are going to be serving steak, we will have steak knives for the customers. Because the customers will have steak knives, they might stab each other. Therefore, we conclude, we need to put each table into separate metal cages, to prevent the possibility of people stabbing each other.

What would such an approach do to our civil society? What does it do to human kindness, benevolence, and a positive sense of community?

When we reject this design for restaurants, and then when, inevitably, someone does get stabbed in a restaurant (it does happen), do we write long editorials to the papers complaining that “The steakhouse is inviting it by not only allowing irresponsible vandals to stab anyone they please, but by also providing the weapons”?

No, instead we acknowledge that the verb “to allow” does not apply in such a situation. A restaurant is not allowing something just because they haven”t taken measures to forcibly prevent it a priori. It is surely against the rules of the restaurant, and of course against the laws of society. Just. Like. Libel. If someone starts doing bad things in a restuarant, they are forcibly kicked out and, if it”s particularly bad, the law can be called. Just. Like. Wikipedia. I do not accept the spin that Wikipedia “allows anyone to write anything” just because we do not metaphysically prevent it by putting authors in cages.

Tags: social-software, steak-knives, web, wiki, wikipedia, workflow

Web: Dive Into Markdown — a great post from John Gruber about editable-text-to-HTML formats (he’s the author of Markdown):

… my actual workflow looked like this:

1. Write in BBEdit.
2. Preview in a browser.
3. Switch back to BBEdit for revisions.
4. Repeat until done.
5. Log into MT, paste the article, publish.

Eventually, it dawned on me: this is madness. The primary advantage to using a computer for writing is the immediacy of editing. Write, read, revise, all in the same window, all in the same mode.

Totally agreed (although note, I’m using my own, very similar, EtText instead of Markdown ;). But this weblog is 100% EtText-driven, instead of HTML — I just throw an email at it, and it publishes it. I don’t think I’ve used the web interface in months.

Which reminds me — I really should steal some ideas gather inspiration from Markdown for EtText at some stage. ;)

Tags: author, bbedit, dive, ettext, html, markdown, post, preview, web, workflow, write

Software: Joel on Biculturalism: ‘What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.’

I’m not sure I agree; I’ve met lots of Windows programmers who take what Joel calls the ‘UNIX’ orientation, and even a few Unix people who are as user-oriented in their coding as what Joel calls the ‘Windows’ way.

But, talking of the Unix/Win divide — it seems that Ward Cunningham, inventor of the Wiki, is joining MS, who have something called SharePoint Team Services, an editable-web group sharing system as part of Front Page.

If you ever wanted to see an illustration of a Windows-Unix divide in the web age, it sounds like this is it: Wiki has quick-and-dirty links in FuglyBouncingCaps, is text-heavy, has obscure text markup formats, has little in the way of roles, access control, or a workflow model, and has some odd magic pages that live in the same namespace as everything else despite being different.

SharePoint, by contrast, is integrated with everything in Office, is a great success where the MS Kool-Aid is viewed as tasty, uses role-based security and a workflow, and seems to be generally reviled elsewhere.

No better illustration. The only thing that could improve that would be if SharePoint has a talking paperclip I’ve missed.

Tags: code, culture, everything, part, sharepoint, software, the, unix, way, wiki, workflow