<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

20060412:

General Business

Worried that what you want to write won't come out as polished and eloquent as you want it to be? Trust your fellow contributors to feel the need to re-work whatever you say, no matter how polished and finished you think it is. It's the nature of the beast. Wikis are about change and evolution on every level and in every detail. By the time you've stepped back to admire your work, odds are, assuming we're as effective as we plan to be about recruiting the world to come and take a look at what we're up to, that someone will already be hitting the Edit button and adding or altering something that you thought was a vital linch-pin in the theoretical argument you were putting forth.

Before you leap to hit the Revert button to preserve your work, please stop for a moment and remember that no one is the absolute authority on anything in here. The Administrators will try to keep things peaceful but the expectation is that anything anybody says is up for grabs. Even when we post a Creator entry and lock it, we're doing a courtesy to the writer who sent it but we're expecting that everyone who is interested in that writer or their works will want to put something in the general article on the same subject that reflects and reacts to what the Creator has to say. The fact that their words become a permanent and unchanging part of the conversation doesn't mean that those words are definitive and unarguable. It just means that they're a permanent goad to the minds of other contributors who are encouraged to develop entire mythologies and counter-mythologies built around them.

Formatting

To create a numbered list, use the pound sign at the start of each entry. Thus:

#One

#Two

#Three

becomes:

1. One

1. Two

1. Three

Today's shout-out

Chris N. Another networking guy (one of many) and another remarkably calm and sensible talker. I often wonder if the logical skills required to figure out programming problems in a language that often doesn't even vaguely resemble anything humans use to communicate doesn't help form an attitude that deals remarkably well with crisis and confusion.

Thought for the day

It's a sign of maturity to be able to see somebody make changes to what you have written and recognize them as improvements.