I think Daniel’s explanation is fair enough.. but I find the current system creates conflicts between personal space and social space. I find it a shame that if you don’t like how a goal is spelled and re-write it you’ll probably end up sharing that goal with no-one. If you on the other hand decide always to take the most popular versions of the goals you have you won’t have any control over how your goals page looks.

Regulating the spelling would be a kind of a rule enacted by a social contract, which is what communities generally do to solve such conflicts. We could even have it voted on.

Another idea would be to allow users to personalize their pages more. Each user could then get to edit how goals were represented on his page while still linking to a communal goals. (for example)

Respond | 2 cheers | Cheer this | 5 months ago (Nov 19, 08:40AM)

Thanks for the suggestion, Tony. Capitalization standardization and spelling are juicy ones which will divide people into camps until the end of 43 Things time. So, it’s going to stay as is methinks.

A couple thoughts:

1) Capitalization (even strange capitalization) makes people happier than sadder in my estimation. This is based on non-scientific impressions from monitoring the email queue and talking to users every day.

2) spelling is another tough one that divides people (more on that later).

Gracias.

Respond | Cheer this | 8 months ago (Aug 29, 10:18AM)

Just automatially make the first letter lower-case. That works best in the contsruction, “Cher Horowitz wants to learn to drive without hitting parked cars.” Also, there should be a better way to correct simple puncuation errors in popular goals, rather than having to start a new goal and associate it with old one.

Respond | 1 cheer | Cheer this | 8 months ago (Aug 27, 12:14AM)