Friday, May 07, 2004

Pool of thoughts

There's an old theory about thoughts that just float around in the ether, waiting for people to pick them up and make them real. There's no telling who will pick up these thoughts, or what exactly they will do with them. A whole lot of people might pick up the same idea at the same time without even knowing or meeting each other and do completely different things with it. Some people might render a thought in a fairly benevolent way, and other times, well, some people are just not benevolent at all. Like the time I was serenading an undisclosed reader and got a bit carried away by publishing the lyrics to Sarah Jones Your revolution, and then about a week later Fallujah revolted. Spooky. I stopped singing for weeks afterwards.

Then there was the time I became a bit bored and pretended to be a nice lady soldier offering re-educative services for these stakhanovite heretics, within about 48 hours those photographs hit the headlines. Creepy. I stopped impersonating female soldiers for days afterwards.

Coincidences aside, the collective-pool-of-thoughts idea has been around for awhile, and I suppose that it is part of the attraction in weblogging.

Well, this is all a bit of a round-about way of saying that someone is setting up a War Wiki, a pool in which thoughts about the "war on terrorism" may collect. Yes I know Dean sounds like a biased hound, and he probably is. The point is that in a wiki anyone can change or add or edit anything they like. Dean gives a good description himself; "What is a Wiki?" (Thank-you Dean). So basically, if Dean writes an article about "the Wondrous Beneficial Leaps in Evolution that May be Implemented Through Creating Depleted Uranium Environments, and How Great it Would be to Give Birth to Children with Three Legs to Help Them Walk Faster" then later on someone could go and rewrite the whole thing to help him say what he really meant; "depleted uranium sux". Of course, if someone wrote that, someone else would probably come along and edit out the profanities... so that, eventually, a quite reasonably accurate article studying the effects of depleted uranium might evolve.

Sorry. This is getting a bit long. Here is some wiki background info for anyone like me who wasn't really sure what it was till about a week ago (coincidently just a few days before reading Deans post) another What is Wiki? blurb and Deans original War Wiki post.

This could be fun.

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