I was reading through Quick'n'Dirty Plural History last night, thanks to a post by @bazelguese-apologist. Something that struck me is how different its telling of the origin of median1 is to Pluralpedia's telling.
And I think it speaks to an issue we've had with Pluralpedia for a while, but not been able to articulate to ourselves. It gives so little context for anything. Sure, it gives the names of the systems who coined terms, but it doesn't ever place them in the context of the community at the time. At best it presents a "great man" version of plural history; at worst... well, probably this actually.
We can't make any universal claims. But we think, rather than an article that defines abstract terms by contrasting them to abstract terms, what a lot of questioning systems need is something that shows the breadth of plurality. And not in the noncommital clinical sense of Pluralpedia. Plurality is fundamentally about people, you can't take the personal out of it. So use anecdotes, individual systems' experiences, to communicate things that aren't universal.
Which, tying back to the start of this post, is what The Wonderful World of Midcontinuum did. And how a website that went down when we were eight ended up playing a key role in figuring ourselves out. Because while none of the anecdotes we read described us, we didn't feel we would be out of place among them.
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The first section of that part.
if you rotate this and squint, I think at the core it's just descriptive vs. prescriptive again... and people keep sliding toward the latter in so many contexts because we were taught to, it's baked into our authoritarian upbringing. breaking those habits and forming new ones is a non-trivial process, and that's after individually coming to the conclusion that we should.
anyway, I definitely agree we need both. well-defined identity labels are extremely useful! they help people understand each other and build communities. but they always need to be understood as inherently imprecise broad-strokes shorthand for coincidental overlaps among the countless unique human experiences they summarize.
