Hi Wirite!  Here is a FAQ/Introduction/HowTo that may be useful before I get a more official page together.

Wirite is a new type of editor that helps any number of people, anywhere in the world, speaking any languages, write anything together.  Let’s see how it tries to do this.

Document Search

The first page is a list of documents that can be edited with the website.  There is a search tool so that you can try to find a document that has already been started which discusses a topic that you are interested in.

Document Support

Once you are in a given document,  one of the main pages is the details page:

This page will show the document, as well as a current snapshot of who is supporting, and not supporting, the document.

Take a look at the tag cloud on the right menu bar:

When you create an account, you can put in any words that you want to describe you, and you can change them at any time.  Here is the information on my user page, for example:

Note also that I put a location in, but not my address, just as much location information that I want to.

The words in the tag cloud are the sum of all the words that people that are currently contributing to the document (meaning that they are doing something with the document, either supporting it, not supporting it, etc.) used to describe themselves.  The larger the word in the tag cloud (such as “dog-owner”), the more people that are contributing to the document used that word to describe themselves.

As you click on various tags in the tag cloud, they will highlight, and the number of people that support and do not support the current version of the document is displayed, and their position shown on the map:

no tags selected…

just cat owners.  looks like 3 cat-owners support the document as is, and 2 do not.

cat and home owning seniors.  

cat and home owning seniors, and happy people.  Note that since the person with this last tag is in Utah, we lost the detail in Baltimore.

For any group that is selected, the sentences in the document will change colors.  These colors represent the level of dissatisfaction of a given sentence for the group that was chosen (in this case, cat-owners).  These are the sentences that will make some people in the group not be able to support the document if they stay in as is:

Also, as each red sentence is highlighted by you, you can see some of the reasons why these red sentences cannot be supported:

They can be voted on if you are part of this group, and you think it is a meaningful reason.

Also, for each sentence you scroll over, there is a popup to do the following things:

• EDIT the sentence (and any other sentences) however you may like
• VOTE on changes to the sentence that other people have made
• VOICE your dissatisfaction with the sentence as well.  In other words, become a non-supporter as well.

These actions of EDIT, VOTE, and VOICE, coming from this page may lend themselves to making changes to the document that try to change the document so that more people come on board the document as it goes to the next version.

These same actions are available on the main document bar:

So they can be jumped to whenever you want without looking at the support dynamics of the document.

Editing

The editing page allows you to openly and freely edit the document however you would like, as if you were the only person editing it:

as you are editing, you can hover over the popup on the side that says “hover to show your edits” and it will do a quick diff to show what you have done so far (it would be great for this to be done on the fly as you are typing, but I can’t find any solutions for that right now):

As you type, the website will periodically check the database for edits that other people have made that are similar to yours.  When it finds some, it will display them as you are typing:

you can click on these edits and see whether they are similar enough for you to vote them up or not:

You may decide they are similar and vote them up, decide not and to keep editing, or vote things up and continue with your own editing.

If you continue editing, after you are done, you hit the button “prepare your edits for voting”.  This will allow you to “package” your edits so that they can be voted on:

Here is the logic of this step: when you are editing an entire document, there are certain edits that “go with each other” and there are edits that don’t.  This step allows edits that must be put in together to make sense, to be “packaged”:

Note that the packages can intermingle with each other.  For example, package 3 here is sandwiched in-between some edits in package 2.  If one, or both, or none, of those packages are voted in, the change would still make sense.

When you are done packaging, and writing a short comment about the edit if you would like, you hit “submit packages”, and the packages are saved and gotten ready for people to vote on.

Voting

Voting is where alll of the sentence packages can be viewed and voted on:

Deal breaks (VOICE)

As we saw in the “Details” section, Wirite tries to give all people with ideas in the minority a tool to influence the document creation: the ability to show that they will not support the document in its current form, and to clearly expresses and pinpoint their problem with the document. This way, Wirite allows all people, even those not able to support the document at a particular version, to continually contribute to it in a positive, open, and real way.

Clicking on the deal break tab will allow you to express these deal breaks:

When you first contribute to a document by making a change, or voting on something, you automatically become a contributor and a supporter (your light is green).  On this page, you can express your dissatisfaction with one or more sentences, that will put you in the non-supporter category:

Now your tags and location are represented by red instead of green, in the supporter pages, and people can see what you are not supporting.  This allows you to influence the document even if your idea doesn’t have enough votes to directly change things.

The combination of this ability to EDIT, VOTE, and VOICE, as well as specifically see dissatisfactions from non-majority groups, may allow the document to come to consensus in order to keep the size and diversity of the supporters of the document as high as possible.

This is an optimistic idea about the innate desires to understand and come to consensus with one another, but also, in many situations, decisions made or causes expressed that do not have a large, diverse group of people backing them will not be as influential in a pluralistic society. On the other hand, a decision that does have diverse support is a very powerful force for change. The goal is a maximization of people that support the document with the most diversity possible, and to avoid gridlock when the system veers into a standoff position.

Document History

The document history tab shows what changes were voted in and not voted in from version to version.  You can see from version to version how the support has changed for the document:

You can click on any package to see the detail of who voted on the package, and what the outcome was for the package.

here is a package that got voted in in version 2 of this document:

and here is one that didn’t:

Note that even though more people voted for this change than not, it wasn’t voted in.  That is because it overlapped with another package that was more popular. 

Document Settings

The settings tab shows all of the parameters of the document, and the current stage that the document is in:

Document Creation

If you don’t find a document that has the topic that you want to start writing on, then you can create you own:

You can cut and paste a document from anywhere: A document you are editing on a word processor, or Google Docs, or a Wiki page, maybe even a movie review.

The title of the document currently is not changed and voted on, so keep it generic so that it can grow with whatever the document becomes (I know… and impossible task).  Several parameters are also entered at this time that will allow the document to move from version to version without leader intervention.  Here is the list:

1. document open or closed:  If the creator of the document would like to only allow people within a predetermined group to contribute, say those in a club or a voting district,  a closed document would be ideal.  If it is a document where the people that may come to agreement with each other is unlimited (err, up to ~7 billion x 0.302), then an open document would be ideal.
2. if the document is Closed, the creator of the document can add a list of emails that will allowed to edit the document.  The emails are linked to the accounts that are made in Wirite.  This list can be changed at anytime by the document creator. [Note: in a closed document, we are giving a larger amount of control to the document creator.  With an open document, the document creator just gets things started]
3. amount of time between document cycles:  This is the amount of time between automatic document version changes.  After this amount of time, all of the edits that have been created and voting on those edits will compiled and put into a new version of the document.
4. number of edits before document cycle:  If this amount of edits are performed on the document in a given cycle, then it doesn’t matter if the “amount of time between cycles” (#3) is up, the document will automatically use the edits and votes that it has and go to a new version.
5. number of votes before document cycle:  similar to “number of edits before document cycle” #4, if this amount of votes are performed on the document in a given cycle, then it doesn’t matter if the “amount of time between cycles” is up, the document will automatically use the edits and votes that it has and go to a new version.

A few notes: The last two (#4,5) are an attempt to not have too many edits to be created and vie for what limited space there is in the document already. And what I would like is on the settings page to have all contributors be abe to vote on their ideal settings for #3-5, and continually taking the average for the actual properties.

Multiple Languages (not working well yet)

Some of the most needed collaborations in this world involve people from different cultures. By enabling people that speak different languages to back a common cause, traditional governmental and cultural boundaries become less of a barrier between meaningful collaboration between large groups of diverse people.

Although Wirite can be used in any single language, another aspect of the method is its ability to allow people that speak and write in different languages to edit the same document with one another. Because the sentence is the fundamental unit of editing, discussion, and voting, each sentence can be immediately and automatically translated to other languages when it is created. Comments on packages and votes as well as the user tags are also translated in this way. Each sentence is in reality a multitude of sentences, one being the original, and the other being automatic translations of the original into all of the languages that Wirite supports. By doing this, the actions allowing collaboration, editing, voting, and discussion within the same document can be performed using any language. This makes the entire process of collaboration on a document language-independent.

Here is how it works: if someone is editing in another language, say Spanish, they will see the document as such:

This edit is stored as the original, and also translated versions.  When this edit is viewed in another language, say English, when it is being voted on, it shows this languages translation of the edit automatically:

The asterisk next to the package and the package comment is a way to know that this was originally created in another language.

So that is it for now!  Thank you so much for helping out with this, thank you for your time, and please let me know your thoughts and ideas!