[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is forever.

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 7/18/06, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it is more to do with Wikipedia's ability to adapt and change
> with developing technology. If Encyclopedia Britannica had created a
> wiki back in 2000, Wikipedia may not exist and Britannica would have
> extended their lifetime by a few decades.

"It's not the technology. It's the social structure, stupid".
Although Wikipedia is about building an encyclopedia and not about a
building a community, without our social structure our project could
not be a success.   Wiki does a lot in facilitating our activity, but
to suggest that Britannica would have had an increased lifetime merely
by adopting Wiki technology is somewhat laughable.

There is always the chance that they'll adapt... I'm not expecting
them to go away any time soon.. It's still a useful resource, is so
much as something which isn't instantly available to more than an
infinitesimal fraction of the world can be...

[snip]
> As long as we are willing to embrace changes and developments (such
> as, at the moment, Wiktionary Z and Semantic MediaWiki) and don't
> object for reasons of familiarity, we should do fine.

To add some contrast:
Just because you die out without some changes, does not mean all
changes should be accepted.  In biology we find that most mutations
are harmful.

Because of the poor resource availability to cost ratio our project is
sorely lacking alternative solutions on the development side. This
results in an inability to produce a 'survival of the fittest'
environment for software features. I am concerned that this is a
significant risk.

I can't suggest a real solution to this today, but I think that one of
the things we already to today helps the situation somewhat:  do as
much as possible without modifying Mediawiki. And with bots,
toolserver, templates, manual, and quasi-manual processes... we're
already doing that.

I'm wary of software which grants someone who merely has working code
the ability to control long term direction of the project.  Enwiki
folks are very concerned about the consolidation of 'power' that comes
from combining a bcrat and a arbcom member in one usrs....  Good thing
that developers are under the radar, because with the ability to make
wide scale decisions without consensus that comes from a patch is
pretty much unparalleled.   But I suppose thats why we don't have any
developers on the Wikimedia Foundation board.