stbenge wrote:
> Jim Holsenback wrote:
> 
>> and he decided to take it offline for a while, as there was no new 
>> real POV contributions being added .... 
> 
> 
> Why do I feel personally responsible for this? I had two tutorials I 
> (publicly) planned on putting up... whenever I figured out how to add my 
> own pages. Not that two tutorials would have amounted to much, but just 
> look at what happened in p.b.i. the other day. One person commented on 
> the lack of images, then this other person posted a couple, and then it 
> was a minor flood of images after that. The same could happen to a 
> wiki... maybe.
> 
> Sam

What you say makes some sense, that a group is composed of individuals 
so you can't build the momentum of a collaborative group without the 
contributions of individuals, and so ultimately it comes down to the 
decision of each individual to contribute or not.

I remember I thought the wiki idea had some exciting potential. For me 
it stemmed from the sense of flexibility and scalability. The promise, 
it seemed to me, was there would be a readymade place to build, say, a 
tutorial, or have a conversation around some technique, that would make 
it easy to do, similar to how blogging servers make things easy.

I know what discouraged me early on was the unfortunate security issues 
and apparent vandalisation. It led to the feeling that work put into a 
tutorial, say, could be vandalised.   I know that techical people around 
here did a good job of nipping the problem but it sent a chill.

Now of course I would also be fighting time constraints along with the 
realization that my own work, technically, has fallen even father behind 
the leading edge of what is going on here.  But I still love the idea of 
metaphorically speaking, being able to walk into a room with a 
chalkboard available, and have a converation with a you or a Thomas De 
Groot, or Steve Piaget, and be able to quickly illustrate what we mean 
as easily as if drawing on a slate.

Also I think it might prove worthwhile to try and analyze what the 
newsgroup format offers that has given it such lasting success here.

-Jim

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