CBZones

ThoughtStorms Wiki

Wikis like ThoughtStorms demonstrate that it's pretty easy to capture a lot of information and even organize it in an interesting and useful way.

BUT ...

There are several major problems.

Stuff goes out of date easily
The good information is hard to disentangle from the mediocre and the dying weeds and cruft.
It's not easily presentable to third parties "Go and read this" is an invitation to go and explore the jungle of information. But not a way to give people a good, accessible and concise "overview". Books still survive because information organized for readers is still valuable (and perhaps more importantly, "influential")
Different things in wiki have different time-spans of relevance. Some ideas are long-term. Some references to people's blogs etc. are medium term. Some political figures and crises very quickly become useless history (ThoughtStorms is full of stuff about Bush and the Iraq war, and comparatively little about Trump). Different kinds of ideas are different ShearingLayers ... how can we distinguish them?

So, part of the mission of CardiganBay is to address all these problems.

One thing I'm currently thinking about is what I call "Zones".

A zone is like a set of pages which might be exported as a separate "sub-wiki" or independent "document" for someone to read, without getting side-tracked / lost in the rest of the wiki.

Zones should be organized in a more streamlined manner than the normal wiki fabric. Fewer dense links to everything else, especially fewer WarpLinks. And a more obvious directional structure to flow through.

But should zones be made of special "zone pages" which repeat information elsewhere? Or should it be possible to have a single page which has elements within the zone and elements not?

Perhaps you can see zones as a dynamic query (or even FunctionalProgrammingLenses) on the contents of the wiki.

This is all still speculative at this point. I'm identifying the problem and thinking about it. I haven't yet started to implement code for it.

But that is the eventual goal.

Some sort of "zones" currently in ThoughtStorms.

PatternLanguageForTheSocialNetwork may be completely outdated and uninteresting. But I'm keeping it around as a guinea-pig for my Zone experiments.
I used to have a separate wiki for musical stuff, discussions about my music, my interests, favourite artists, inspirations etc. I now decided that I want to stir all of this into ThoughtStorms too. And explore using Zones as a way of taking