[Pil-pc-oceania] Wiki world

[Deb Guildner]

Yes, Jedd,  indeed!

But I would no sooner trust one website to be an encyclopaedia than I 
would...one encyclopaedia!

IT, IT, IT.....

I fondly remember the days when there was none. No IT!  My offspring has 
grown up with it.
I sometimes wonder if her generation will ever rediscover their relationship 
to the real world.
Sometimes they do seem lost to the 2- D world of IT.

The internet can be a valuable resource, to be sure.  It is kinda time 
consumng though.

To date I have not resorted to using a Wikipedia. Or spellcheck. Its amazing 
how many people these days are amazed that people can spell at all, let 
alone well enough to be considered literate. Most software in fact is quite 
unknown to me, though being into writing, publishing software is on the 
agenda.

I am...the lucky generation!  My daughter cannot even do simple math in her 
head after 12 years of education. Thats what calculators are for!
Now they are making small children in primary school complete endless lists 
of skills updates of...you guessed it....IT!

In 1973 I had a dream which showed me a classroom full of students using 
what now call  PC's.
It seems there's little in this world that constitutes an original idea. 
Someone, somewhere, was busy trying to turn mainframes into.......IT-PC's.

Around the same time, I had another crazy dream that stuck in my 
head...because it too, was so far out of the ordinary.
I was standing in the office where I worked then, up on the 14th floor, 
looking out over the northwest of old Adelaide, (towards where I am right 
now!)
but in my dream it was covered by water.  Very little was above water, just 
the odd tall building, a tall chimney or two.
In reality, the area is all less than 10 metres above sea level. It could so 
easily be 10 metres below....one day.

But you wouldn't need a wiki to figure that out, given the 
current......ideological ...or is it...idiot logical......climate!

Mostly I spend my time getting my digits to create some kind of revolution. 
Online activism is the best aspect of IT yet.
Perhaps that is the real digital revolution!

Today I gave the executive officer in charge of the GM review in SA a bit of 
homework to do.
Questions need answering! I hope some of you folks are getting submissions 
in.  NSW is still open for submissions till 30th August.
I'll keep y'all posted.

Om.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "jedd" <jedd at progsoc.org>
To: "permacultue discussion list" 
<pil-pc-oceania at lists.permacultureinternational.org>
Sent: Monday, August 20, 2007 5:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Pil-pc-oceania] ppp blog


> On Mon, 20 Aug 2007, Deb Guildner wrote:
>> Wiki entry is subject to change by anyone, it seems.
>
> Note that wikis are a technology type.  Part of their power
> is that they can, usually, be modified by anyone - the advantage
> there is that you can fix mistakes as you find them, rather than
> posting a fix to someone who may or may not understand the
> distinction and may or may not have time to update their site.
>
> Wikis are not inherently wicked because of this feature, though.
>
>>   a.. Wicked Pedia alterations | The Australian
>
> The Australian's expressed opinion should be assessed in the
> light of how it sees the world, of course.  Would The Australian
> be happy to see people consult other sources than itself for their
> information?  Do they have a vested interest in beating up a story
> like this -- effectively a story about a competitor.
>
> I suspect the distinction here, between providing the ability for
> anyone to update an online reference source, and a newspaper
> that will only modify its view of the world if you were to, say,
> enact some monumentally wicked media ownership laws .. is
> left as an exercise for the reader.
>
>> RE:Wiki, I'd leave it in the internet outbasket.  It's hardly an
>> authoritative source.
>
> By which I guess you mean wikipedia - which is a site that happens
> to use a wiki technology (a suite called MediaWiki, which they've
> also used over at http://www.permaculture.info, as it happens).
>
> Most people I know consider Wikipedia to be authoritative on any
> number of topics.  Mind, most people I know are IT nerdy types, and
> while there's the occasional jihad in this field, it's not as prone to
> outright lies and manipulation as, say, politics, military, commercial
> media, et cetera.
>
> Every page on wikipedia contains accompanying talk/discuss and
> history (of changes) pages -- useful things to work through if you're
> in any doubt as to the veracity of the information you're reading.
> ( If only print media provided this level of meta-data about every
> story they published. )
>
> I'd suggest this is a preferable approach (and indeed, you should
> be thinking critically whenever anyone tells you anything, in any
> medium) to the outright dissing of the 7.9 million articles, and the
> tens of thousands of active contributors, on wikipedia.
>
> Jedd.
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