Both patterns and wikis are useful only in the context of a publication – that is, a web page, a book or other tangible form of dissemination... the publication is not of a single discrete and static body of information, but of a hyperlinked network that can be linked in useful ways according to the user's needs... the publication itself bounds the growth and evolution of the context. There is no way to transcend the original creator's intention, and there is no way to allow overlap between the communities that might subsequently create content.
“federated” publication methodologies. These methodologies allow “overlap” - duplication of work by parties who might have different needs, concepts and approaches – in the same way that a plural and democratic culture also allows overlap.
Indeed, so do biological systems, as has been noted by evolutionary biologists. As with these systems, the successful examples emerge from proliferation and variation, not through creation by a singular and exceptional agency (even a curation agency). The authored output incorporates measured and interpretive experience, i.e. quantitative and qualitative representations.
...the limitations of publication can be transcended through a plural, evolutionary system.
Herbert A. Simon about the same time, in his classic paper “The Architecture of Complexity” (Simon, 1962): The elements of such complex systems often had strong interaction capacities as well as weak ones, and the strong interaction capacities tended to form hierarchical subsystems, allowing the system to be “nearly decomposed” within our models – that is, grouped into functional sub-units that could then interact in a more usefully comprehensible way.
“A pattern language has the structure of a network,” wrote Alexander and his colleagues in the book A Pattern Language (Alexander et al., 1977). “Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.” In that book and its companion The Timeless Way of Building, Alexander and colleagues outlined the theory behind this language-like approach to design, drawing on structuralist influences like George A. Miller and Noam Chomsky (Alexander, 1979).
*The significance of pattern languages as a discovery within the logic of problem-solving, within the logic of nature itself is a wondering... Is there a logic at play in nature?*
In an even more fundamental sense, both Alexander and Simon were reconsidering the age-old philosophical topic of mereology, the nature of part-whole relations, but doing so from the perspective of a cybernetic age in which the elements of design were vastly more numerous... Alexander focused more than Simon on the inter-connected, not fully decomposable nature of the patterns – that is, the network aspects – and their crucial importance in creating the web-like structure of many languages – and many successful designs.
the ability to manage complex systems through design strategy was a common goal.
flexibility and language-like adaptability
like patterns, wikis are bodies that evolve through repeated application, evaluation and refinement.
The evolutionary relationship between wikis and patterns languages is a simple one. Wikis were developed in 1995 as a tool to support the development of pattern languages in software (Cunningham, 2009). More specifically, it was developed as a tool to allow collaboration between many people as they evolve better collective solutions to shared problems. That means, among other things, that both the knowledge of the problem, and of the solutions that have worked so far, needs to be captured and refined, in a form that can be shared and further refined (Leuf and Cunningham, 2001).
There are 5 characteristics of "wiki nature"
The two main ones seem to be identified here: the prototypical pattern language was unable to be shareable and editable by a wide community of users, and unable to be falsified and refined over time.
In the case of both patterns and wikis, the goal was to exploit the power and flexibility of language to generate new knowledge, working from the best of existing structural knowledge. In both cases this required the collaborative identification and storage of this existing knowledge, in a way that it was available in a simple and ready form.
A philosophy of language, John Searle (1965), Noam Chomsky (1980), George Lakoff (2008)
1. Humans have the capacity to construct shared reality through a series of acts. 2. When those acts are vocalizations we call them speech acts in natural language. 3. Those acts and their consequence are heritable and thus subject to evolution. 4. Pattern language, as developed by Christopher Alexander, mapped a useful subset of the heritable knowledge of building. 5. Wiki, as developed by Ward Cunningham, maps a useful subset of heritable knowledge within the context of user websites, and their missions or “site charters”.
“elegance”: the ability to do more with less. Cunningham embodied this principle in the question, “what is the simplest thing that could possibly work?” This encourages a process of exploration and learning, without assuming the need for particular structures in advance (Cunningham and Venners, 2004).
Cunningham was intrigued by the capacity of language, in its very ambiguity and economy, to serve more ably as a useful working model for problem-solving. A problem .. has many overlapping and ambiguous connections. Language mirrors this capacity, and therein lies its usefulness. Therefore the goal is, in a sense, to achieve the same robustness of language, by endowing the model with its own set of powerful (but limited in number) generative components, much as language does.
context-adaptive problem-solving power
some system of rules could generate behaviors instead of specifying behaviors. (Cunningham, 2011)
the genetic process is able to generate, and regenerate, an intricately complex structure from a relatively simple set of language-like instructions.
identify the generative elements that produced the structure, recombine them in another generative process, and let the structure be re-generated. This is a far simpler, more elegant – more “agile” – approach to design.
“neutral tone” demanded of Wikipedia articles
part-whole relations and to the mereology of knowledge – the ways that we can reconcile some portions of knowledge with others, and determine, to a large degree, an overall working reliability.
In the institutions of science, new knowledge can in principle come from any source, but it must be assessed for its accuracy and fit with what is already known. New knowledge must be able to explain not only the unknown but also, in the same terms, the already known.
Culture is surely not a “tree” – in the same sense that a city is not a tree. On the other hand, it is not a murky thicket either, and we must not let our knowledge come to seem a murky thicket of misinformation, ignorance and self-serving hucksterism.
communities, of varying scales, must develop a working consensus to solve their problems together. Indeed, this is probably the very definition of "intelligence," defined as a species trait.
In important cases of policy and practice - such as climate change, for example - some knowledge of details and predictions will always remain uncertain, while there is a working consensus about a key portion. The uncertainty is not a liability, however - it is the very essence of the process of learning.
a "chorus": This is the manifestation of a harmony; "a larger network of voices that are not stating exactly the same thing, but that can contribute, through their very diversity, to a larger whole. From that larger whole, a working consensus can emerge."
Knowledge growth... What is a growth mindset, actually? This suggests it is being open to having perceived knowledge "grow more comprehensive, integrated and reliable, in spite of - or actually because of - the remaining differences in perspective." = increased smarts = increased benefit = increased new and effective problem-solving, including broad and abstract human challenges.