[jutta], would it be possible to create an additional level of moderation?
Have people be able to merge similar ideas. There would have to be some level of sanity to this, to avoid destruction of the connections we're creating. Security = keeping us free from pathogens.
So we'd have to be able to restrict the ability to edit the database in this fashion to a select few, which could grow to many in the future as the number of contributors increase.
I'll add another idea with the following, as it's worthy in its own right: we have voting for ideas, we should have voting for individuals. I.e., give everyone the ability to assign a score, from -10 to 10, to each account. You'll be able to see who voted for/against you, so you can discuss the issues with them and reach understanding -- by not hiding the voting I hope to increase communication and thereby increase the value of this database.
In terms of the interface, I'd imagine it would be fairly simple to just put all three ideas, one after the other, on the same page. Give the "moderator" who merges the ideas the responsibility of entering a meta-heading to describe the idea in general, and a summary.
People should be able to continue to add annotations to each individual idea, and to the meta-idea as well. This increases the number of connections in the brain we're growing.
My thinking is in terms of creating better organization of this not-yet-self-aware database we're creating.
Another way of increasing the communication inside here is if a parser scanned each annotation for square brackets around an account name, and gave that account a link to the idea with an annotation mentioning it. So [jutta]'s attention would be called to this idea.
Add a link in the "account:" section, "mentioned in", for people to see where they're being talked about/to.
This way each individual would be fed ideas related to ideas they had posted.
Even better, add the ability to do private messaging. Email is great, but some people may not want to associate an email address to their accounts -- and increasing the communication of the community helps it grow.
Thing 1-- Thing 1, Aug 13 2000 Before something like this can be implemented, perhaps Halfbakery can add a "recent" page listing which categories have been updated with new content instead of just its current "recent" page listing new ideas/ideas with new content. Putting more focus on categories would reduce multiple similar ideas.-- jvonr, Jan 01 2003 random, halfbakery