Talk:Main Page:Archive6

article 999999 on wikipedia
I was article 999999 on wikipedia. Even if my article was deleted, i also launched an invitation on this occasion for people to come and join WikiHowTo. I hope more people will join. moa3333 00:45, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
 * thats pretty funny... did u just happen to notice the # was close to 1M or did u script it??  ZyMOS 03:48, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
 * there were 200 pages created in less than 10 seconds and about 400 in 20 seconds. My page was named One million articles. But yes, i like to think i just noticed...

I believe i corrected all the spelling on all administrative/help/policy/about/etc pages. I've been using a spelling extension for (seamonky/mozilla/firefox). so its a start. ZyMOS 06:07, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Spelling

I made a page for site statistics About:Statistics, once my script are more reliable, ill automate the posting of statistics and page lists. Maybe run it once a day ZyMOS 06:07, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Site statistics

=Objects=

Style
Ive noticed that various styles have been used to create object page, I think we should choose a basic style for the object pages, so its easier for people, and more uniform. I made a page with all the various styles. Help:Page_Styles/Object. I'm not saying we need to go and change all the objects right away but maybe from now on, we use a specific style.
 * Personally i like styles 3 or 4 ZyMOS 02:56, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Alias
Here is a idea. having aliases, for example Alias: Windows 2000, Win2k, Microsoft Windows 2000, added to the object pages. Only for exact word matches. ie frog is not an alias for toad. It would be something like this:

Object: Microsoft Windows 2000

Alias: Windows 2000, Win2k, Microsoft Windows 2000

I think it would be useful, but its just a thought. ZyMOS 02:56, 7 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Here is a practical example: Chain_maille ZyMOS 05:25, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Organization
Ive been cleaning out the categories of old pages, so we can start making portals for organization and easer access. ZyMOS 01:01, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Removed Categories
I have removed all the pages from the categories(over 150), except 3 for administrative purposes Category:Merge, Category:Historical archive, Category:RecycleBin ... Most of the pages that were not guides, objects or howtos i put in merge. Some of the simpler ones i made into objects, a few of the more complex i made into guides. Ones that did not seem to have any content i put in Category:RecycleBin. I tried to to delete any content, i just removed the category tags. There are allot in Category:Merge that need to be converted to something... ZyMOS 06:12, 23 March 2006 (UTC)]

Categories and Portals
I think it is time to start up the portals or some type of organization. If you want we can just put objects in categories instead of making portals, but ill let u decide because i don't really understand the portal thing yet.... So once u make a few organization pages and ill get the scheme, ill start making them too.. ZyMOS 06:12, 23 March 2006 (UTC)]

Is "Do It Yourself" a proper term to refer to these guides?
I have now been working in Japan for some time, and realized, that in this society the know-how is kept in the people themselves. That is, as you enter a company, you actually are taught an exact know-how, and as you master one things, you are being taught another.

I have also worked in a software development company. That company actually kept some of the know-how in a wiki style (PukiWiki), so that they wouldn't need to explain something repeatedly.

I also saw a biased, but showing a true phenomenon, movie about cooperating ants, which says something about their ability to perform any necessary tasks both as a worker and as an engineer.

Even the primitive people lived in small groups, not alone, and had to cooperate.

I digressed a little, but what I wanted to say here is that maybe the word "Yourself" in the term DIY, sounds improper.

As for me, I think it would good if this resource became also a mean to teach people, and allow people to cooperate and be very flexible. Inyuki 07:28, 27 March 2006 (UTC)


 * When i added "do it yourself" i did not have any philosophical intentions, I simple wanted to add it as a keyword for search engines. Many page on the net make no difference between tutorial, howto, guide, or DIY.  For instance i was searching howto bind a book and i didnt find good results until i got to a DIY book binding page. It was a well written tutorial, or howto or guide, but went under the title DIY.  I and not sure that users would make any distinction.  It just how they are used to searching. "Book binding tutorial", "Howto Bind a book", "Guide to book binding", "DIY book binding"  User:ZyMOS 21:27, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Promotion as a convenient mean to teach

 * And yes, I should agree to quotation:the best way to deal with the two projects is to have wikiHow creating high quality articles that "explain" things, while WikiHowTo will have better organization, integration with Wikipedia, linking to other pages and will not hesitate to link to high quality pages on wikiHow. Complete guides would do better in promoting this project.. And also, the wiki of the company I worked for, had complete guides in their wiki.

And when I finally think of how to write these good articles, I come up with this idea:


 * PROMOTE IT AS A MEAN FOR TEACHERS to teach other people that they want to teach. (Actually, I have already started using it this way: I sometimes, when I wanted to teach how to do something for my friends, I used to write new HowTos here, and then give the links to my friends, in a mailing list, so I was a kind of "teacher". It was a quite comfortable mean not to repeat the same thing, and to say how exactly to do it.

So, I propose promoting it to teachers, university lecturers, and other people as a convenient mean to teach.

Inyuki 07:45, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

(N.B. I use word "to teach" in the sense -- "teach perform tasks")

A new way of teaching
I agree, this could be a way to promote it. This is a revolutionary way to teach but it does not seem so for most people. This is why there is a real danger, witch is to see people trying to apply the old patterns of conventional teaching to this site, witch will produce a good learning site but will not go much further. In order to eliminate this, we should say that University lecturers should forget everything they know about (and i repeat about) teaching and should try to focus only on the little experience they have working and learning in group. On the contrary, teachers especially teachers in the low classes have even more the risk not to understand the concept at first.

A few things should be clear:
 * this site is not intended to replace the education system as it is today and not even to complete the courses you have there in most countries without making the students feel real uncomfortable (there are REAL conflicts between what this will help you learn and the system in schools); other way to say it for students: if your teacher will use this site, you will certainly learn a lot of things, but this will not help you obtain good results at school at exams (unless the university you are have a revolutionary evaluation system)
 * this site is intended as a learning system for people who already have obtain a diploma, and are out of the classical education system. It introduces a new way of learning: learning that is interlinked with teaching and working at the same time. This means it will be most useful for people that are learning as they are working and that will also want to contribute (because when you contribute you learn more than when you are passive)

We are used to learn abstract things unrelated to using them. When people take a good cup of "learned" things they realize that they "know" a lot of things. In a traditional society, this is enaught to work. IN this society, they take a job and the boss tells them that they do not have enaught "experience". What it is really, is that you still have to learn what the school did not learned you, and it is NOT experience you lack in my opinion. It is that didn't learned the right way.

Let me explain more. If someone in 1600 who is an expert with 60 years of experience in making knifes. If he comes in a factory in 1900 he will be told he has "not enaught experience" maybe. Actually he has experience, and he knows a lot of thinks,  but they are not good when he works in a modern factory. The same way, someone who knows a lot of thinks from school/university, has the wrong bases. Between the 1600 and 1900 the major change was to the productivity regarded as number of units per hower regardless of the quality. It means someone form 1600 would have been able to produce knifes that are 10 times better than what it is produced in factory, but will know have any idea how to produce 10000 knifes in one day. On the other hand, in this society, the informational society, the "productivity" becomes less important seen as number of units per hower. The same way the quality of the produces was not very important in 1900. Yes, when you can buy 30 knifes at home, you don't care the knife is not very high quality. The same way today, when you cannot sell more than a certain number of knifes, you do not want to create a huge number but you want to hit market and then you have to diversify your offer.

So, today, you have to care less about knowing how to do many usints in a factory and you cannot apply the old artisanal way to diversify your offer and stay up to date. Many people know how to increase the number of units produced (most of them are formed in China however this days). What is really needed in western countries is people who are able to innovate, to learn "on the way", to adaptate and forget deprecated know-how, to apply as they learn and then forget what they learned in order to be able to learn something else which will produce more value than the old idea.

You always have a constant part, this is a know-how that is stable. People can't just forget, then re-learn. Well, not using the habitual education system. You can try that but you will not be able to go much further. You just have to change the constant part. In 1600 the constant part was the know-how for every product and you will see how this is coming back with an air of modernity. In order to learn in 1600 you had to use the voice (no manuals) and you had to Do It Yourself, or see others do it in order to learn. You also had to learn while you do it, no way to take first a diploma on creating a knife. In 1900, the base changes. It was not about making a knife, but about knowing physics that will allow you to create any type of knife or anything else, but only mass creation in factory. Today, in the information society, the base is not any more to know physics. The base is to know how to know. This means the base is to know "how to use WikiHowTo" for example. You have again a return to the past: you must learn while you work like in 1600 and you must be a worker and a teacher at the same time (the master was showing to the student how to make a knife by doing one, not by writing on a paper about how to do it). In WikHowTo we have both: a kind of paper and a mixture of teachers, students and workers who are one and the same person.

You could also take the prosumer idea developed by Alvin Toffler in 1969. The most known futurologist of modern times predicted in 1970 that the world is going to eliminate the difference between consumers/producers or client/server or teacher/student as he enters the new era, the information era. He invented the world "prosumer" to call the new resulting complex person of the XXI century. WikiHowTo-ans are prosumers.

This beayng said, we cannot create factories if you don't have universities. The same way, one WikiHowTo will be complete it will replace the university in factories. I would like to see job offers asking not a degree, but knowledge on how to use WikiHowTo! moa3333 10:19, 27 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Teaching is someone who knows more about something and passes the knowledge down. A student is someone who what to learn something and is seeking knowledge. If you can find professional teachers that are willing to write articles that would be great but the whole idea behind wiki is written by the common person for the common person.  Everyone knows something better that someone else, and they should write about it. and if someone knows more than the original author they should add/edit/remove/correct the artical for the better.  unless i am misunderstanding you, i dont think that pages should wait to be written by experts.  If we expect that, we will have 10 really good articles every 10 years.


 * As for other sites outside of the wikimedia world, i agree, we should link to them, there is no point in having an inferior artical on our site when there is a better on another. But our ultimate goal should an all inclusive system like wikipedia. If wikipedia were pages with sets of links to external pages it wouldn't 1/2 as good.  Perhaps a way we can do both is to have short explanations of external page with the links, and the page stubbed to imply the intent of improvement.


 * I am not an absolutist, and i dont think the page should be my way. I just want to make sure that the direction we go is the most practical for the common user

User:ZyMOS 21:27, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, finaly everyone will get used and will be able to contribute, not only experts. Actually there are no such experts, there are only people who are not used to new ways of writing pages like wikis. I think people on Wikipedia will get used more easily. Also teachers that are not contrbuting to wikipedia, but we should always try to take care of the organisation, witch whould not be very difficult. I would really want to know what will be the future problem: not enaught contributors or too many contributors that don't understand how to edit pages? In the first situation we nead to make it more atractive, in the seccond case it means the system is too complicated and bad doccumented and we can add policies to it.

Realted to making it only for teachers, i am still doubtfull. I think people working in companies that are more linked with the latest technologies know better than teachers from universities. I think everyone is intended to contributed, from 12 years children on articles about how to play with dolls to 60 years womens who explain how to take care of the garden... Anyway, its too early to speak about this, we still don't have enaught contributors. What we can do is make a region onn the page with links to various kind of people: teachers, corporate leaders, children, old persons, and for each create a page to explain the benefits one could obtain; it will be explained for each person diferently; but not change the general-purpose idea behind the web site. moa3333 08:05, 28 March 2006 (UTC)


 * I think we are on the same page. I just misunderstood what you two where saying earlier.  Are you satisfied with the way things are going on the site?  I am. I think its about time to organize a catagory/portal system.  we have a decent amount of howtos and guides, So i think we are ready

ZyMOS 05:36, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

-- Inyuki 133.9.4.11 19:28, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I am quite satisfied with the progress of the site also! And the HowTo_Wiki:About, where the term "instructional knowledge" is used, I think is very effective to explaining what this is.

Are we writing software that the society will run?
Software is runned by computer, WikiHowTo - by people

While working in Japan, I have noticed also another nuance about the work here.

Your teacher tells you how to do it, and at first you have to learn to do it without too much asking why (of course, they answer, why but there are many cases, when it is not discussed).

People are producing the products exactly as taught.

Then, of course, there is a way how to suggest ideas on improving the method of doing, but any changes take place quite slow.

So... And I also noticed these kind of tendencies Software development too -- you first create a program, test it, and only then give it for general use. You again create something, and the ntest, and when you see that it's working, you release it again.

I think that WikiHowTo has a similar nature to be software for our society.

According to the Long Now, it is good not to hurry.