User:EdwardNWM/On Documentation: Difference between revisions

VassarWiki serves two distinct but interrelated purposes: 1) to facilitate information sharing for present-day activities, and 2) to document campus life for the historical record. Here, I want to focus on some concerns I have surrounding the latter purpose.

Documentation—what I define as the externalization of knowledge outside of human brains into persistent objects—is not passive. By documenting the world, we transform previously fleeting moments into objects for extended examination. This process has tremendous consequences for the way we live. Documentation obviously isn't new; it's existed since at least the invention of writing. But the degree has changed; documenting devices have become increasingly ubiquitous and of high fidelity. As a result, our entire lives are becoming persistent objects.

In many ways, this has been a good thing. Documentation, by [[wikipedia:Extended_mind_thesis|extending our minds]], allows for complexity to compound on itself, which has produced civilization and all its fruits. Documentation allows us to examine ourselves, to hold ourselves accountable to our actions, to spark growth.  

But documentation isn't ''purely'' good. Growth requires examining the past, yes, but it also requires abandoning parts of the past. College is a time of major transformation because it's an environment separate from the past and future, an environment that allows for experimentation without major long-term consequence. Documentation, as a tether to the past, can disrupt this opportunity.  

While developing VassarWiki, we ought to keep the multifaceted impact of documentation front of mind. We need to find a balance of remembering and forgetting.

 

 

We should not document the identities of individuals unless we have explicit permission from that individual, the actions documented are unambiguously public, or documenting that individual would have acceptable social consequence.