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Let.sysops.be

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Revision as of 01:13, 22 December 2008 by Banban08 (talk | contribs) (→‎License)
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[{{{URL}}} {{{logo}}}] [{{{URL}}} Let.sysops.be]
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let.sysops.be deals with the professional issues of the shift to P2P and to user-authored content (so-called web 2.0, wiki-centric). Major assumptions include the right to leave hosts without losing data or technical barriers (including the ability to fork wikis very easily as guaranteed by open content and open configuration), democratization of naming, flattening of namespaces, and trolls.

  • the essay on the real web 3.0 provides a good starting point to understand the scope of coverage

Not for beginners

The target audience appears to be software and service architects and perhaps academics and students. It maintains a list of articles on topics that are considered defensible, though the references on many articles are weak. It also maintains a list of practices actually used. These seem to take some pressure off to allow more speculative or opinionated statements on pages without these tags. This is one of many good practices followed in this wiki.

Design economics

LSB covers design issues from a hardcore economic and analytic "systems perspective" with the basic assumption that the fantasy world of the net is merging with IRL politics and economics. The individuals whose views are cited in depth include Clay Shirky, George Lakoff, Donella Meadows, Jay Forrester, Craig Hubley, Marcus Ranum, Donald Knuth, Bill Joy, Ron Dembo, Bernard Crick, and many others whose expertise spans psychology, management science, organization design, economics and other fields. To understand a typical page probably requires at least some prior exposure to the fields of study mentioned. Graduate students who know how to use a search engine and are willing to put a little time into learning unfamiliar terms will be far more likely to get benefit from reading let.sysops.be than casual browsers who have no particular prior exposure to the problems of venture capital, investment theory, language and metaphor theory (for this last, most US readers should see dkosopedia.com for the most sophisticated example of a wiki applying these methods directly to familiar issues).

Among the most immediately useful articles on design economics and metaphors include:

For the more political aspects it often defers to definitions at openpolitics.ca, SourceWatch, embodimentwiki.org (an even more sophisticated psychology/biology wiki). A central political question is who controls the editorial and governance path on a shared web service like a wiki. The many articles dealing with trolls and trolling making the assumption appropriate to P2P, that they must be dealt with as equals. This is why P2P best describes this wiki's purpose.

Technical coverage

Technical coverage is no less sophisticated. The level of discourse is high and includes most or all of the very hardest problems in security, hardware, software and online service design. Some of the interesting technical material for wikiindex users includes:

Teaching wiki

As the material reads like a bunch of notes for a series of graduate courses, it isn't surprising that the wiki recommends picking a particular category and reading everything in it, then asking a lot of questions or adding contrary opinions or references, which the "old trolls" (what the sysops call themselves) will deal with rigorously. Part of the wiki ideology espoused, aside from generally troll-friendly policy and shunning of sysop vandalism and sysop vigilantism, is that a wiki, in order to work, must necessarily focus on the content, and avoid social factors deciding what is discussed or debated. To this end, let.sysops.be encourages anonymous trolls, keeps first person discourse on talk pages and user pages, and evaluates every policy from the perspective of disinterested or hostile new users with knowledge worth sharing - the so-called new troll point of view. Like Wikipedia, let.sysops.be remains open for anyone to edit, to satisfy the scientific method, in which any contrary evidence is allowed to invalidate any thesis, and even wholly untrusted critics must be heard and answered. To further enable hearing out minority point of view, issue/position/argument structure is employed. Anyone who finds the dominant point of view on a page is making it hard to express his or her argument can re-organize the controversial points into logic trees. If debate gets intense, evidence, sources, and authority handling are all built into the category scheme.

Good examples

This category scheme seems to be the major feature of this wiki. To put it simply, every infrastructural aspect of hardware and connectivity to get to the first wiki edit is defined as part of infrastructure and goes in one category 'infra', as everything social and financial (like selling and training) that happens after that goes in another category 'ultra'. The first wiki edit is treated as the most important distinction of all!

Other good examples of best practice include:

  • redirecting names of categories to the category and treating them as just another tag, and always using singular not plural forms (as tags do)
  • as mentioned above, dealing with precedent and credibility with separate "defensible" and "empirical practice" tags
  • keeping controversial terms in their own "term namespace" so that the wiki won't be seen to be sanctioning any deprecated terminology
  • keeping command terms that have specific meanings in REST protocols (like "get") in a "verb namespace" to keep the strict technological meaning separate from the ordinary conversation meaning
  • keeping good documentation of internal practices such as edit summary tags and page name prefixes
  • insisting articles adopt Wikipedia names when talking about roughly the same topic, and further adopting their naming conventions

The entire wiki, which is named eg, is designed to make it easy to copy and cut out all content not relevant to a specific purpose, while keeping as many pages as possible.

License

The material is redistributable with credit to "Efficient Civics Guild" and link-back to the source under CC-by-nc-sa, or other open licenses sometimes marked on individual pages.

Peer-to-peer


Also See <a href="http://esl.about.com/od/writingstyle/English_Writing_Style_Sentence_Paragraph_and_Essay_Writing_Skills.htm">English Writing Style</a> <a href="http://www.monash.edu.au/lls/llonline/writing/general/essay/index.xml">Essay Writing Guide</a> <a href="http://www.bestessays.co.uk">Essay Writing</a>