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Automatic aging is a good suggestion, though some mechanism for manual review / rating (and, probably, aging of that) could also be quite useful. It's easy to build toy systems. My working definition of "complex systems" is "you've got to think before doing something". There are interactions, there are implications, there are consequences. You can cobble together a small wiki of a handful, or even a few dozen, pages, with ease. As that collection scales, both in page count and page size, the ease of working with the compilation becomes a challenge. The Unix / Linux world offer a touchpoint. Of documentation, there is source code, in-application help, manpages, alternative documentation (hello, texinfo, please go rethink your meaning for existence), collections such as the Linux Documentation Project (once a gem, now rare to find a HOWTO younger than a decade and a half), various distro wikis and documentation archives. There is documentation which remains current and useful. The Debian project updates (and creates) manpages (and considers their lack a bug, though not a release-critical one), as well as a trove of its own docs (some now staling a bit, though much still admirably current). My view is that all documentation is a palimsest, and for utility if not archival, old velum must periodically be scraped clean and re-inked with new works. Memory and memorialisation are themselves a denial of progress and time. This can be useful, certainly, but also handicapping. Active projects, work teams, and organisational documentation suffer from the challenges of constant flux (project, goals, priorities, personnel), under-resourcing, often a failure of any participants, certainly most, of having an accurate (or mutually consistent) big-picture view. That moment at the end of an RSA Animate lecture where the camera pulls back from the whiteboard and suddenly the entire scope of a talk is presented as a single whole has its analogue in technological work. As for metadata, I've just had a long (and profane) Mastodon discussion on that topic. Relevant bit begins about here: https://mastodon.social/@mathew/103116638919554591 Structuring of documentation is a whole 'nother religious war. For books which can only occupy a specific location on a shelf, that's essential. For files or documents within a CSM, various other groupings become more appropriate, and can be flexible, though a nominal "principle map" or route through the major elements of a corpus can certainly be useful. The bound codex provides both random access and explicit ordering of content, principles which are difficult to improve upon. Online systems which can create on-demand standalone formats (PDF, ePub, HTML) can be a useful hybrid and/or emulation of this. |