Paragraphs as Atomic Structure

And here we come to something that is very hard to get about Federated Wiki which Mike Caulfield would love your help explaining — Ward likes to say his interest is can you take a few simple ideas and data structures and make them really generative. **And so you have this simple idea of paragraphs as the atomic structure rather than pages, and suddenly the lousy revision histories we have turn into this beautiful, almost poetic view.**

> I have worked in educational materials reuse for ages, and looked at every tool imaginable — they all try to deal with reuse at the level of the page, and bad things happen. But the paragraph/item! Suddenly revision histories make sense, partial reuse is simple, Data can live next to Text in harmony.

There’s maybe ten ideas in federated wiki like that — where Ward has (as Mike Caulfield thinks) realized either that complexity was being generated by having the wrong underlying model or that generative potential was being quashed. And each one on its own could radically change things. But it’s hard for people to see that part until they start digging in. We’re used to minimal viable products, we’re unused to maximally viable models. page

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Our dreams for this technology are pulled in different directions by competing traditions as to what we put into computers and what we expect to happen there. Hypertext straddles this division and is thus able to go either way. But our dreams are most likely aligned with one or the other.

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⇒ Kate Bowles ⇒ Composition as a ⇒ Practice of Taking Away.

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