Refactoring happens when an individual rewrites a block of text, producing a novel organization, new prose and helps to clarify the meaning and intention. This is different to AnnealingText which is a gentle, incremental, piecemeal, and slower process whereby text is altered by multiple parties. [1]

Refactoring or reworking is a common practice in extreme programing and means rewriting a block of code to simplify, reduce errors, improve execution times and readibility.

Wikis are the main collaborative genre where refactoring is a central tenent. DenhamGrey

The term Refactoring originates in recent object-oriented programming practice -- especially the Extreme Programming methodology -- where it describes the practice of gradually revising a program to make it clearer, simpler, and easier to understand without changing the program's function. [2] The core text on Refactoring is Martin Fowler's influential Refactoring [3]. Martin Fowler's home page -- which begins with a very slow-motion weblog -- is useful as well [4].

Refactoring of some sort is likely to be important in any hypertext which is:

malleable (old writing can be revised)
volatile (subject to changing understanding and EmergentStructure)
chunky (nodes or pages have strong boundaries)

One of Michael Joyce's recollections for the original motivation for Storyspace [5] was the realization, while writing afternoon, a story [6], that he could not decide whether a particular passage worked better near the beginning or near the end of the tale. This uncertainty is, of course, familiar to most writers, and by 1987, when Joyce was writing afternoon, word processing had made it easy for writers to move passages freely. Joyce realized, however, that a hypertext could let the same passage appear in both places -- converting a refactoring problem into a hypertext pattern.

Contrast with: AnnealingText

See: DocumentMode | ThreadMode

-- Last edited October 27, 2002

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Refactoring Text