Lessons from the Fireside: Synthesizing the Journey Thus Far

An excellent summary of the situation overall, if you remap it from horror-genre into information for people who want some. I think the purpleness of the prose should be scaled back a bit. I don't think it's inherently a bad idea to use melodrama (though some might: melodrama is a self-parodying style, and advocacy too easily parodied is soon replaced by its opposite), but I think you have to be careful with it, and sometimes here you fall over into bathos.

I find the use of other peoples' papers also a double-edged tool. Where you are actually in contact with the substance of others' ideas it is exactly what the wiki is designed to achieve, and I'm very pleased to see it working. Where you dip into someone's writing just to fetch a turn of phrase, which is entirely appropriate of course, I feel the loss of an actual connection and its replacement by a mere reference, like the junk-mail use of %WIKIUSERNAME% to make a small point where a large one might have been possible.