Digital gardeners are upfront about a post's status

Created: Dec 16, 2022 | B quality | Mid importance

Shawn Wang lists Epistemic Disclosure as one of the foundation principles of a digital garden, thus invoking the philosophical field of Epistemology. This study of the "theory of knowledge" leads us to understand how digital gardeners should responsibly disclose metadata about posts or nodes to readers.

In this garden, I've listed the "quality" and "importance" stauts of each node right on the node's page. The "quality" in my mind is a measure of how well developed the idea is. The importance, on the other hand, measures how much weight I give to the ideas presented. A "Low" importance post might be a passing aside, or a wrapped redirect to another resource. Meanwhile a "Top" imporance post is foundational to myself and the garden.

Where do these scales of quality and importance come from, though? Well I am the primary maintainer of the Wikipedia 1.0 Bot on English Wikipedia. This bot takes quality and importance assessments that are added to articles by members of "WikiProjects" and aggregates them and reports their distributions. The basic idea is to take a chart that looks like this:

Chart of philosophy articles quality and importance

And move all the numbers to the top, based on how far they are to the left. So presumably, if you have an article that is "Top" importance, but it's only "Start" quality (5 articles in this example), you should invest more time in those than the articles that are "Low" importance and already "GA" quality.

The full list of article qualities is:

And the importances I'm using are:



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