Larry,
Thanks for clarifying your original posts and rebutting some responses.
I didn't realize at first that you were talking about forking
Wikipedia. That would be, as you say, a horse of a different color
from changing the way in which Wikipedia currently runs.
First let me reiterate what I think you are saying, so if I am again
missing the point, at least you will know what I am responding to. You
want to have some articles taken out of the domain of the collectively
editable, and put into a space (say ExpertWikipedia) where they are
maintained exclusively by some expert or experts. This would break
synchronization with Wikipedia, i.e. there would be no automatic
transferral of information in either direction. If a Wikipedia article
evolved in a way the expert disapproved of, s/he wouldn't incorporate
the changes. Similarly, if the expert article didn't satisfy members
of the Wikipedia community, they would modify it and evolve it into
something different. In brief, the project would be forked.
Pursuing the free software analogy futher, there used to be much talk
about inevitable forking, and the potential of forks to kill off the
movement. In practice, however, forks have been very rare. The only
serious infrastructure fork was over libc/glibc, and that remerged
before long. It turns out that two versions of the same program can
hardly ever survive. Either one draws all the developers and comes to
dominate the field, or all the good ideas from one are merged into the
other, which obviates the necessity of having two.
My question for you, Larry, is why the same immense pressure against
forking wouldn't also apply in the free encyclopedia movement. If
there is a Wikipedia/ExpertWikipedia split, why wouldn't whichever is
dominant gain all the momentum and all the contributions?
Suppose that ExpertWikipedia becomes the site that everyone uses as a
reference work. Suppose that my contributions to Wikipedia are not
being incorporated into ExpertWikipedia. In that case, I will become
frustrated and quit. If I contribute further the free encyclopedia
movement, it will take the form of trying to influence the expert in
charge of the "official" version of the article. I will submmit my
patches (edits) to her/him at ExpertWikipedia instead of wasting my
time at Wikipedia.
Conversely, suppose that Wikipedia becomes the site that everyone uses
as a reference work. Why would experts want their work to languish in
obscurity on ExpertWikipedia? They will either quit and go back to
writing scholarly books and articles, or they will wade into Wikipedia
and try to get there stuff to stick there.
You talk about experts in this way:
Someone, or a group of people, that the best minds of
the world can
look to and say, "This is fantastic. They want to do this? I want
to
be part of it."
There's the rub. How can ordinary people be a part of the expert
project? I think you need to spell out in more detail how you evision
a back-and-forth flow of information between the forked projects. What
would make it different from the Wikipedia/Nupedia distinction that
exists today? If an expert-led free encyclopedia is such a great idea,
why isn't Nupedia taking off by itself?
(7) Fred Bauder was right to point out that a lot of
the people who
could help *Wikipedia* most just won't put up with arguing with
people
who they think should be sitting down and taking
notes.
Very true. And many expert programmers do not suffer fools gladly, and
do not enjoy the frequent heated discussions which open source software
projects generate. Those experts work for Microsoft, found their own
startup companies, or work in academic research where they can do their
own thing.
On the other hand, many academic experts *want* commentary and
contributions to whatever they write. Participation in conversation is
as big a rush to established scholars as it is to schmoes like me. Of
course nobody has much time for unsubstantiated fringe opinions and
idiotic assertions, but I'm talking about perceptive questions and
critiques. I can imagine many situations where a pool of informed,
cooperative amateurs would not be a hassle for a leading expert, but
rather a positive draw. And one thing I, an informed amateur, can do
to make an expert's life pleasant at Wikipedia, is to spare her/him
from the hassles of reverting vandalism, answering easy questions, etc.
It so happens, though, that as the movement has grown
in stature,
those people who make the decisions really *are* software experts.
[...]
This doesn't contradict anything I said, moreover.
Quite so, the leaders of the big free software projects really are
experts. But it does contradict the spirit of what you said, because
almost none of the free software projects are "experts only", and an
insignificant few projects have experts-only forks. (e.g. Netscape is
a fork of Mozilla, but Mozilla is carrying the flag and drawing all the
volunteer participation. Netscape is technologically insignificant; it
matters only as marketing.) In almost all cases literally everyone can
submit incremental changes (i.e. patches) to every project. If there
is a mechanism for ordinary schmoes to submit incremental changes to
the ExpertWikipedia in your proposal, I missed it.
The robustness of open source projects is vastly enhanced by the fact
that anyone can contribute to any extent they like. Some of the expert
leaders have worked their way up through the ranks by submitting
numerous small patches, then maintaining a subsystem, then taking over
entirely when a leader steps down. All this happen with no recruiting
and no official designation of who is expert. It is allowed to happen
because there is no distinction such as you are proposing.
I can imagine Wikipedia evolving to the point that we semi-officially
designate subsystem experts (e.g. Axel Boldt as math czar), and maybe
give them power to protect a small number of pages. But somehow
ordinary folks have to be able to get their oar in or the project will
suffer. Even the main page, which we decided we had to protect, has a
talk page for making suggestions which our 39 administrators respond
to.
The disanalogy between software and encyclopedia
article writing is
simply that software has to work. It has to do what it is supposed
to
do. As software grows in sophistication, this
requires huge amounts
of expertise. But encyclopedia articles do not work or fail to work;
I agree that there is some disanalogy there. But how significant is
it? Please note that open source projects often exclude submissions
that work perfectly well. The grounds of exclusion can be that code is
unmaintainable and/or difficult for peers to review. "How well does it
work?" is in fact sometimes less significant than "How beautiful is the
code?", as witnessed by incomplete patches with rough edges but
beautiful underlying structure trumping crufty code that gets the job
done with no errors. Deciding which code is worthy is far from black
and white.
Anyway, the disanalogy only matters if the quality of encyclopedia
articles is not generally recognizable. It will only harm Wikipedia if
people routinely fail to recognize the scholarship of experts who know
more and write better than they do. So far I see some of this failure
to comprehend on Wikipedia, but not as much as I suspected, and not
enough to put a systematic brake on the success of the project. In
fact, I think it would be very instructive to visit the discussions of
some open source projects, and see whether various proposed patches
generate more or less disagreement than edits on Wikipedia. I suspect
you would find as much heat in the open source movement as in the
typical edit war on Wikipedia.
Peace,
-Karl
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