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tenor of meanness in the discussion. Imagine if the subtext of every discussion you had in the real world was a kind of running, pedantic nitpickery in which every point was explicitly weighed and judged and commented upon. You\'d be an unpleasant, unlikable jerk, the kind of person that is sometimes referred to as a \"slashdork.\"

As radical as Yahoo!\'s conceit was, Slashdot\'s was more radical. But as radical as Slashdot\'s is, it is still inherently conservative in that it presumes that editorship is necessary, and that it further requires human judgment and intervention.

Google\'s a lot more radical. Instead of editors, it has an algorithm. Not the kind of algorithm that dominated the early search engines like Altavista, in which laughably bad artificial intelligence engines attempted to automatically understand the content, context and value of every page on the Web so that a search for \"Dog\" would turn up the page more relevant to the query.

Google\'s algorithm is predicated on the idea that people are good at understanding things and computers are good at counting things. Google counts up all the links on the Web and affords more authority to those pages that have been linked to by the most other pages. The rationale is that if a page has been linked to by many web-authors, then they must have seen some merit in that page. This system works remarkably well -- so well that it\'s nearly inconceivable that any search-engine would order its rankings by any other means. What\'s more, it doesn\'t pervert the tenor of the discussions and pages that it catalogs by turning each one into a performance for a group of ranking peers. [fn: Or at least, it *didn\'t*. Today, dedicated web-writers, such as bloggers, are keenly aware of the way that Google will interpret their choices about linking and page-structure. One popular sport is \"googlebombing,\" in which web-writers collude to link to a given page using a humorous keyword so that the page becomes the top result for that word -- which is why, for a time, the top result for \"more evil than Satan\" was Microsoft.com. Likewise, the practice of \"blogspamming,\" in which unscrupulous spammers post links to their webpages in the message boards on various blogs, so that Google will be tricked into thinking that a wide variety of sites have conferred some authority onto their penis-enlargement page.]

But even Google is conservative in assuming that there is a need for editorship as distinct from composition. Is there a way we can dispense with editorship altogether and just use composition to refine our ideas? Can we merge composition and editorship into a single role, fusing our creative and critical selves?

You betcha. 

\"Wikis\" [fn: Hawai\'ian for \"fast\"] are websites that can be edited by anyone. They were invented by Ward Cunningham in 1995, and they have become one of the dominant tools for Internet collaboration in the present day. Indeed, there is a sort of Internet geek who throws up a Wiki in the same way that ants make anthills: reflexively, unconsciously.

Here\'s how a Wiki works. You put up a page:

	Welcome to my Wiki. It is rad. 
	
	There are OtherWikis that inspired me.

Click \"publish\" and bam, the page is live. The word \"OtherWikis\" will be underlined, having automatically been turned into a link to a blank page titled \"OtherWikis\" (Wiki software recognizes words with capital letters in the middle of them as links to other pages. Wiki people call this \"camel-case,\" because the capital letters in the middle of words make them look like humped camels.) At the bottom of it appears this legend: \"Edit this page.\"

Click on \"Edit this page\" and the text appears in an editable field. Revise the text to your heart\'s content and click \"Publish\" and your revisions are live. Anyone who visits a Wiki can edit any of its pages, adding to it, improving on it, adding camel-cased links to new subjects, or even
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