Doc / Music / filkWiki: Crosstime Versioning

This is just an unformed idea at present, but the filk process could be captured in something like a version-controlled WikiWiki. The idea is that there are really three different kinds of ``versioning'' going on.

  1. Normal (timeline) versioning, where an author makes changes and adjustments to a song (or, more generally, anything else).
  2. Branching, where somebody introduces a variant. An example of this process is, for example, Jordin Kare's variant performance of Duane Elms' Dawson's Christian, where he makes substantial changes to the wording in places, but it's still recognizeably the same song. This is easily captured in the version control notion of "branches".
  3. Filking, where somebody creates an almost completely new (sometimes totally new) song ``based on'' the old one -- a parody. In programming this is called ``cut-and-paste re-use.''

In a ``filkWiki'', this idea of ``crosstime version control'' would be formalized by allowing people to create, not only new versions, but new variants and new parodies. These would be linked, so that one could easily find all the variations and filks of a song, or follow the trail back to the original, or view the differences.

... So every page in a filkWiki would have ``filk this page'' and ``make a variant'' buttons to go with the more usual ``add a comment''. On songs, of course, only the original songwriter would be allowed to edit the official version. Discussion Wiki's and so on would have different conventions.


$Id: filkWiki.html,v 1.2 2001/12/08 18:33:36 steve Exp $
Stephen R. Savitzky <steve@theStarport.org>