Potentially redundant pages (merge?): Date Stamp, Signing Witha Date, Consider Timestamping Your Writing
If you write on the Wiki, it might be a good idea to "timestamp" your writing by putting the UTC date and time you wrote it. -- Edward Kiser [Sun Apr 8 2001, 8:45 AM UTC].
''Edward, what benefit would there be to knowing when things are written? Unless there is a reference to current events, pop culture, or the latest release of some programming tool, the content of Wiki is about things that remain true indefinitely. Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language book doesn't say, "in 1963 we figured out that balconies should be wide enough to have a table and chairs so you can eat outside"; that's true for balconies in any century.
That being said, an automatic timestamp feature, and an option to show or hide timestamps during reading, could be an interesting new feature for some Wiki Clones to develop.
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Chronological is only one of many possible organizations of technical writing and rarely the best one at that. On wiki it has been dubbed Thread Mode and is actively discouraged by some and especially myself. -- Ward Cunningham
It is impossible to ignore the Wiki Now nature of Wiki.
But -- timestamps are strictly voluntary, they seem to be of no more significance than signing one's contributions, and, like the signatures and everything else, they can be refactored out if they become useless. In particular, they do not need to be used as a basis for a system of organization. -- Edward Kiser [Mon Apr 9 2001 1:00 PM UTC]
On the other hand -- refactoring another person's writing is not a transparent, automatic process. It involves quite a bit of discretion and judgement and perhaps even worry. When someone comes along to refactor a page with your timestamp on it, will your timestamp trip em up? Will that person ask themself "Why did Edward Kiser use a timestamp? Is the date & time germane to what he's saying in a way that I'm not seeing?" Maybe that person will forge ahead and refactor anyway. But maybe that person will think it's too much trouble, skip it, and then your innocuous timestamp has inadvertently become Anti Refactoring Noise.
It seems to me that the main advantage of timestamping would be to log the shifts in a poster's opinions over time. As Ward says, this is by nature a facet of Thread Mode (as is giving your Real Name, for that matter), which is undesirable if the Wiki is about concepts rather than conversations - though I would argue that in the absence of a separate discussion mechanism, Thread Mode is inevitable. I would recommend timestamping only for Thread Mode conversations (such as this entire page) but not for 'real' articles, which are nominally Consensus Building efforts. I would hold, however, that the Thread Mode conversations are of some historical value. Perhaps what we need is a separate discussion forum, though that might suck the life out of Wiki... Wiki Pedia has gone out of there way not to be like Wards Wiki, out of desire to avoid Thread Mode, but this creates an artificial impression of consensus even where none exists. Do we, in turn, need to avoid becoming Wiki Pedia, and if so, does that mean that Thread Mode is a necessary part of Wards Wiki? Ah, perhaps I should have let sleeping dogs lie. -- Jay Osako, [2008:01:30-1814]
If your statements have temporal content, put the date inline. As in, "These days, in April, 2001, I feel as if the current political climate has become too tense." If they have no temporal content, don't put a date in at all. As in, "Goedels Theorem is..." should not have a date. For opinions that may change over time, it's best not to write them on a wiki. Instead, only write in the third person as if you represented the class of people that held those views throughout time. Then make the temporally relevant information examples in the argument. In the above, "Political climates can become tense for many reasons. For instance, in April, 2001, ..." Finally, personal testimonial should be written in the representative tense. For instance, "Where I am currently working, we do... and I think this is..." or "Where I used to work, I used to... Now, instead I think..." This way, future readers will interpret your statement as part of the continuing process of maturing your opinions.
In the latter case, the problem with a wiki is that two opposing statements made by the same author at different times, can be read nearly in the same breath (could be merely one page away from each other). This is an aspect of the medium that should be understood by the reader. Often, this is only a call to refactor the pages.
Timestamping comments may be an unneeded confusing device. It's not necessarily a bad idea, it's just that if Wiki was supposed to know about when somebody made a comment, wouldn't it know that without being told? Wiki doesn't know much about time for a reason. Try living in the Wiki Now, you might even enjoy it.
I think it would be a lot more likely to catch on if there were an easy way to do it; i.e. some sort of shortcut that the Wiki server could automatically expand to display the timestamp in place of the shortcut.
Yes, it might be more likely to catch on. However, Ward actively discourages it so there is no easy way to do it.
One of the nice things about Wiki is the atemporal speaking on the pages. 3 years after I wrote a long series of posts to a set of pages, a friend at my coffee shop, who had previously been a chemist and had just taken up programming, walked into the coffee shop and said, "I just discovered wiki..." and smiled... and I smiled back... because we both knew he'd stumbled across those pages I'd written 3 years before. But because they were not timestamped, in his own reading of them, they could have been written the yesterday. And that was beautiful, something that is lost on every eGroups list. When he wanted to add a comment, he couldn't tell if he was adding to an ongoing conversation, or a long dead one (and if it had been dead, his comment might make it live again). No conversation on wiki is dead, so long as someone is busy contributing to it. -- Alistair Cockburn (who did timestamp his prediction that the people on C3 would stop practicing XP properly 6 months from now )
Agree with all the sentiments Alistair. But Plain English may be worth recommending on this, at least that's the way it looks to me in midsummer 2001. Did you see that I cleaned up Low Ceremony Methods yesterday, where you do much the same thing? One of my favorite phrases of Wiki to this day (which I doubt it's important for anyone later to know with total precision). -- Richard Drake
Sometimes it's easier to understand a contributor when we know what context he's responding to, i.e. which posts he might have read. Threads growing linearly are a clumsy trick for that: There should be a way to insert a comment ANYWHERE in a thread without losing that information. A serial number would work. Since the NEED for a serial number is a function of the topic, it could be a convention made available on a topic-by-topic basis. I'm a newbie not a programmer so you'd have to work out the details :)
While I totally agree that timestamping for Document Mode is unnecessary and probably inconsistent with the idea of the wiki, I can't understand the mindset that is against the timestamping in Thread Mode.
I do not see any disadvantages in having a timestamp for each paragraph. If I am not interested in timestamps, I basically oversee it. But how are you going to recognize the flow of the discussion? One might argue that Wiki Now applies to the Thread Mode. Yes, maybe for the first time. But if you are deep in a complex concept with versatile points of view and vague arguments (sure we all try our best to bring up the conclusive and convincing arguments, but how often do we fail to achieve this goal?), your best call is to read the ideas in the chronological order considering the context, the state of the art and knowledge of that time.
Some discussions may go for decades (and this is the pro-argument of a wiki). And comments and replies may be added years later implying recent insights. How should someone understand the chain of arguments if he doesn't know what these are based on? Which statements are assumptions, which are hopes, which are wishful-thinking and which are proven facts? Of course we are best to mark our statements with according attributes, but "unfortunately" we are humans and tend to imply what is common knowledge. Furthermore, how pleasant or nerved would you be, if the speaker proves each of his statements regardless how obvious they are (might have been object of research years ago)? E.g. "common knowledge" about the center of the universe before Galileo Galilei and after his work.
One more need for the timestamp is a simple look up for the new content on the page. Maybe there is a feature for it that I am missing, but I do not know how I can see what is new on the page, once I clicked on it in Recent Changes. Again, in terms of Wiki Now you don't care for last changes on the page, if you first time visiting the page. But it is very different for the Thread Mode pages. If you actively participate in a discussion (or even just observe how the discussion is going on), you do not want to invest each time half an hour to scan the page for recent changes. Especially, if the discussion is in a hot phase and there is no consensus so far.
A workaround would be to save the page on your own PC and make a diff, if you see the page in Recent Changes. But is it what we want? -- Sergej Pauls
There have been many times I've read something and wondered when it was written, but I also absolutely don't want to tag every entry with the time. If only computers had some magical way of tracking time, they could do it for us. ; But, that would probably make quite a mess of the pages. --dab
More than one timestamping occurs anytime you create a file, browse a page, compile a program, or for that matter, do anything on or with your computer. I have, since the first time I wrote something down with that great big pencil on the old "Big Chief" tablet in first writing class in primary education, been in one way or another "timestamping" my writing. When it was lead on paper, the date persisted, with the computer, some of the timestamps are changed at the time one opens, reads, modifies, or otherwise handles a computer artifact. Ward's latest creation, the Federated Wiki, is much concerned with when things are done, down to each separate paragraph in a page artifact, and a visible journal is created to track and make accessible this information. What one might consider in ones writings however, is to write the date and time down in the text to make it then searchable or reviewable as a textual time-stamp. Like this -- > Donald Noyes.20130325
See also: Arguing With Ghosts
See original on c2.com 