The & thing was supposed to be about denoting that the group that wrote it was a plural system, as opposed to a singlet using, say, the online handle of "Astraea" or whatnot.
One of the things about the project being badly handled early on was that there was a big deal made over coming up with "universal modifiers" that would show everyone when it was a group or someone in a system talking. Actually, there was never any real consensus on this issue. The one that eventually ended up being adopted was "System^Person"; for instance, "Blobs^Fred" if Fred was a member of the Blobs system. But not everyone was happy with this. Some people didn't like the fact that it emphasized the system before the person's name; other people thought it wasn't necessary to have any designation at all to show when someone was part of a plural system, because it worked against the point we were trying to make, was that people in systems were individuals and should be treated as having just as much personhood as any single person.
But that also led into a sticky point, too, because some systems don't experience people as fully separate, or do experience them as parts of another person, and so what do you do about them? There was a lot of talk about creating resources for medians, for people who didn't experience their system members as fully separate individuals, but then that got bogged down in arguments and debates over who counted as a median and a lot of untenable theories attempting to define what exactly the difference was. And this ended up taking precedence over the page itself, in the end.
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Date: 2007-03-13 09:05 am (UTC)One of the things about the project being badly handled early on was that there was a big deal made over coming up with "universal modifiers" that would show everyone when it was a group or someone in a system talking. Actually, there was never any real consensus on this issue. The one that eventually ended up being adopted was "System^Person"; for instance, "Blobs^Fred" if Fred was a member of the Blobs system. But not everyone was happy with this. Some people didn't like the fact that it emphasized the system before the person's name; other people thought it wasn't necessary to have any designation at all to show when someone was part of a plural system, because it worked against the point we were trying to make, was that people in systems were individuals and should be treated as having just as much personhood as any single person.
But that also led into a sticky point, too, because some systems don't experience people as fully separate, or do experience them as parts of another person, and so what do you do about them? There was a lot of talk about creating resources for medians, for people who didn't experience their system members as fully separate individuals, but then that got bogged down in arguments and debates over who counted as a median and a lot of untenable theories attempting to define what exactly the difference was. And this ended up taking precedence over the page itself, in the end.