[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is forever.

[Oldak Quill]

>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.

I was making the assumption (an assumption which I maintain isn't
invalid) that having put the Wiki infrastructure in place, and having
done a little advertising, the project would have been successful. I
don't think Wikipedia was successful because it grew from the FLOSS
community. It was successful because anyone could edit it (you could
argue that this was entirely because Wikipeida grew out of the FLOSS
community). Britannica could have been just as successful if they had
allowed anyone to edit.

> 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.

We do, in fact, have quite a powerful development environment. The
"open-sourceness"of our software allows for interesting twists and
turns in MediaWiki. Others can develop MediaWiki in a ways that we
don't have time and resources for. As an example of this, just take a
look at the development of Semantic MediaWiki on Sourceforge. This
development takes nothing from Wikimedia resources but potentially
benefits us on a grand scale. This is facilitated by our commitment to
free software - the ability of others to reuse our work and create
better things with it

I think we *do* have a "survival of the fittest" development method.
Apart from the aforementioned "open-sourceness" of our software,
members of the community (who aren't developers) spend their own time
developing certain features and additions in the form of bots and
tools on toolserver. These features are then put through rigorous
practical tests (bots function on Wikipedia, proving their worth and
exposing their mistakes). If one of these features proves to be
wonderfully useful, it is assimilated into MediaWiki proper.

-- 
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)