Chris Dent writesin praise of purple numbers. These paragraph-level identifiers enable re-use of content. Chunks of good ideas are locked inside larger units, within documents and discussion threads.
The benefit of purple numbers is that they unlock insights, increasing the liquidity and flow of ideas. The drawback is that they break apart arguments. Insights may be captured in paragraphs. But arguments are conveyed across multiple paragraphs. You need more than one paragraph to provide context, to set up a contrast, or to draw a causal connection.
Sometimes, picking apart the individual points is what’s needed to find the holes and strengthen understanding. Sometimes, picking at individual points is a sign of a flamewar — people are searching for points of disagreement. Picking at points can increase the quality of thought, or reduce the quality of thought by reducing the incentive to build toward a larger theme.
In general, the wiki form is conducive to concensus, by bringing people literally on the same page. It will be interesting to see how wiki+purple affects the quality of thought and level of agreement.
“Insights may be captured in paragraphs. But arguments are conveyed across multiple paragraphs. You need more than one paragraph to provide context, to set up a contrast, or to draw a causal connection.”
This is exactly the argument for granular addressability and transclusion. Whereas traditional paper style quoting–where a chunk of thought from document a is copied into document b–provides a rough path back to the locus of an argument, granular addressability provides a direct path back to the quoted chunk in the context of its argument.
Purple numbers have been tested in real settings (in Blue Oxen collaboratories and the development group of Indiana University’s Knowledge Base for example, where the numbers are integrated with blogs, email archives, wikis and problem tracking systems) where they’ve been shown to be effective at building consensus, not by keeping people on the same page, but by allowing people to connect maximum context to the same page.