Making Annotations to Principia Cybernetica Web

Annotations are not in any way evaluated or selected. Any text entered by a user is automatically and immediately published on our webserver, and linked into the annotated page (in the lower part of the side bar, under the header "Discussion"), and into the general list of all User Annotations. The editors are therefore not responsible for, or will not in general agree with, the text in an annotation. Although annotations as a rule remain available indefinitely, annotations that are no longer relevant (e.g. because they point out an error that has been corrected since) or that are offensive may be removed.

Our intention is to provide an open forum for discussion of the content of our pages, so that everyone can freely contribute with alternative ideas, illustrations, expansions or criticisms. However, this openness also means that many annotations are of poor quality, with bad spelling, confused ideas, or low relevance to Principia Cybernetica. Since the editors do not intervene in the text of an annotation, we can only ask the people who make an annotation to reflect well about what they will write, and to check their text for mistakes before hitting the "Submit" button. The better the text that you submit, the more likely that it will be taken seriously by later readers.

In Principia Cybernetica Web, annotations have the status of "Discussion Nodes" (see Consensus building). This is to be contrasted with the "Individual Contribution Nodes", which the editors have accepted as fulfilling the general requirements of quality, accuracy and relevance that characterizes Principia Cybernetica Web. Unlike annotations, individual contributions are added to the table of contents, alphabetical index and title search index. Individual contributions cannot be created automatically, but must be submitted to the editorial board. Unlike annotations, they should be seen as refereed publications.