Talk:Self-organization

Contents

1 Bibliography 1.1 Linking bibliographies 1.2 Old vs. new books 2 Copyright issues 3 Wikis as an example of self-organisation 4 Featured article? 5 Conflated? 6 Examples of self-organization without emergence and vice versa

Bibliography

Linking bibliographies

To 129.26.132.3 and Lexor:

I agree that there should be no links inside the titles. The proper way to do is to link the entire title; the linked pages are supposed to be book reviews. It might be appropriate to link the authors, though. -- Miguel

Links to authors are OK (I have already done this myself in the biblio), but keywords in titles are already listed in the article text and especially in the "See also" sections. Linking to the book title is appropriate if the review exists (or will likely be created at some stage), especially for important works (e.g. Darwin's Origin of Species, or in this context, perhaps Origins of Order by Kauffman or Design for a Brain by Ashby). I don't think every book title should be wikilinked as a matter of course, because it's unlikely that every title will have have a review written for it. -- Lexor 01:50, 26 Aug 2003 (UTC)

On the other hand, empty links encourage people to fill in the content. Someone who has read Origins of Order and sees the empty link may feel inclined to write a page about the book, and the idea might not have crossed their mind otherwise. -- Miguel

True, but not for every book in the bibliography. It's unlikely that there will ever be descriptions for every book in the biblio list (especially for articles with long biblio lists). I agree for "important" books (which is suitably vague, I know). I think links should be provided for books which we would most likely want a description, or think we might plan (or suggest to somebody else) to write later, but I don't create links for every single book title, I think it gets distracting, not to mention the problems with disambiguation for common titles. I think that there should be some editorial discretion as to which book titles we want to have pages for. I agree that Origins of Order would be a good one. There, I just created a wikilink for it... ;-) -- Lexor 01:15, 27 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Old vs. new books

Is there any justification for the division between "older" and "newer" technical books? If a single list was sorted chronologically, the reader of the article could decide for him/herself. On growth and form is a timeless classic, and the book by Eigen and Schuster is to a large extent still current because 30 year is not a long time for a revolutionary contribution. -- Miguel

The division was somewhat taken from the source I used. Feel free to merge them and sort alphabetically. Nice work on the article, by the way! It's looking pretty substantial now. -- Lexor 21:00, 16 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Copyright issues

I rewrote stub from scratch as the existing paragraph was take wholesale from the external link cited.

To the original submitter: please don't copy text from external sites without having obtained permission to release under the GFDL, see Wikipedia:Copyrights. -- Lexor 09:19, 3 Aug 2003 (UTC)

---

I have obtained permission to adapt some Notebooks under the GFDL from Cosma Shalizi (http://bactra.org). -- Lexor 09:13, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Subject: wikipedia self-organization article
To: Cosma Shalizi (http://bactra.org)
Date: 05 Aug 2003 06:57:08 -0700

I remembered reading your notebooks about self-organization 
(http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/self-organization.html)
which has good snappy definitions and references and biblio entries,
and I was wondering whether you'd be willing to let me adapt it and
contribute it to the project and of course you are cited for your
contribution.

You could edit them again yourself, if you wished, even anonymously.
Basically you retain complete copyright (see:
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights), but license it to
wikipedia under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html), which is like the GNU GPL, but
for documentation, which you're probably familar with, so it has the
same "copyleft" nature.

From: Cosma Shalizi (http://bactra.org)
Subject: Re: wikipedia self-organization article
Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2003 16:02:29 -0400

Which brings me to the Wikipedia: by all means, adapt away!

Wikis as an example of self-organisation

Does anyone else see a wikiwiki as an example of a self-organising system? I gues it would make a great example on this page. --Anthony Liekens 22:30, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)

No, a wiki-system is (mostly) not self-organizing. A system that consists of a wiki-system plus its users is a self-organizing system, where a significant fraction of the system (e.g., the wiki contents) is organized by elements of the system. -- Peter, 24 Jan 2005

However, a wiki is a great example of stigmergy. Should we cross-link "self-organization" with "stigmergy" and with other forms of organization? --DavidCary 23:29, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Featured article?

With just a little more work this could be a good Featured Article candidate. --Erauch 04:16, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

File a request for peer review. — Miguel 06:27, 2005 May 20 (UTC)

Conflated?

Might the word conflated be out of place in this article? There is a Wiktionary entry for it, but nevertheless my more conservative nature must wonder if perhaps its usage here, at least without reference to definition, might not overstep a bit.

Could a better word be chosen?

Could the word be a link to http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Conflation ?

Could there be one of those odd little parenthetical numbers with a question mark or whatever it is after the word that off-site-links to the definition on wikitionary?

And why the fuck is Wiktionary missing so many words. Seems like that's the kind of fundraiser that would be easy to accomplish.

A Prominent announcement somewhere on Wikipedia that Some Month/Week will be "Fill in the Holes Week" on Wiktionary, or some such. Post a "Missing Word List" and just get 'er done. Or at least get her leaped forward.

Anyhoo,, I'd humbly suggest that conflated, while clearly defendable, is a bit too masturbatory for this article.

-:)Ozzyslovechild 03:36, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

Examples of self-organization without emergence and vice versa

Sometimes the notion of self-organization is conflated with that of the related concept of emergence. Properly defined, however, there may be instances of self-organization without emergence and emergence without self-organization, and it is clear from the literature that the phenomena are not the same. The link between emergence and self-organization remains an active research question.

Could someone please provide either an example of instances of self-organization without emergence and emergence without self-organization or a specific citation to literature that the phenomena are not the same?

The Self-Organizing Systems FAQ for Usenet newsgroup comp.theory.self-org-sys (http://www.calresco.org/sos/sosfaq.htm#2.3) makes no mention of such a distinction. -- Nick 15:41, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)