행복한 충돌

You are headed to add a new piece of code. Unbeknownst to you, it already exists in the system. If you find out about the pre-existing code, you have had a HappyCollision. If you don’t, duplication has stealthily propagated. —wiki.c2.com/?HappyCollision

A property of Wiki where authors citing non-existent pages discover that they do exist. It can be extremely pleasant for the author; finding out that someone else has dealt with the same idea, issue or problem makes us feel a little less lonely. Often that someone else has come at the issue from a different, eye-opening perspective. There’s also the relief of not having to write a new page from scratch. ;-) —wiki.c2.com/?AccidentalLinking

I see wiki as a place where people work out the names of things that they will say. Since our spoken vocabulary is small, we must struggle to find words that carry value commensurate with the space they consume in our brains. Where works collide in wiki they will also collide in our thoughts. Usually that is a happy circumstance.

Still, we often establish the context of a conversation so as to avoid or at least disambiguate many of these collisions. And we have to note the context switches we make in conversation. The analogy of context switching I’ve chosen for wiki is SisterSites. Two sites are candidates to be sisters if the collisions in their vocabulary are likely to be useful. The reader, like the listener, has to decide where to take the switch.

As a sister, you should feel just the right amount of pressure to call thing that we share by the same names. It is a subtle thing, but very powerful when scaled. —Ward Cunningham, Half Sisters