What I'm trying to do here is to create a rhetorical situation what will help writers get themselves organized and help them create content that can be better built on than we've seen before. The idea of Pages as Public Spaces may or may not work.
This might have been overlooked in the first wikis, but wiki pages are public spaces and not private notebooks.
That distinction might not help much in composing because the sense of what to do in developing a pubic space varies. Being public, that is, is not constraint enough to signal what kind of writing to engage or to direct what to do or how.
In public spaces, it's not about you. It's about us.
Decorum is in operation.
The dictum to Make Things Tidy is active.
Pages as Public Spaces suggests a rationale for the opening summary: Here we do this ... as a rhetorical declaration of the space. "We don't jump on the furniture here."
In public spaces, we take the time and effort to compose our ideas. This is not a place to leave odd notes for others to clean up. What's valuable are nascent ideas.
But this is in tension with It's My Wiki - I'll Do What I Want To, or Pages as Personal Spaces as we saw in some pages developed for Teaching Machines. Who are you to set the rules for this space? Ownership.
Wiki as the Commons - ok
Wiki as Soapbox - less valuable.
Publics might be a way in.