On 7/5/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
I would disagree that people on the project like chaos, or with the idea that the project is really chaos.
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WP as a project is... the largest most active focused online open community project to date. It's hard to say that we're chaotic, or attract people who like it that way... we have little to compare it to.
Both of these statements are spot on.
The whole open wiki reference idea works. It probably shouldn't, but we are stumbling towards goodness. It can work better. But it is working.
And then again, perhaps it should. Many sea-change large-scale reference works over the past few hundred years (including great early dictionaries and encyclopedias) have adopted a broadly collaborative approach -- though shaped and limited by what mechanisms were available. Likewise the whole open publishing model that lets just anyone grab paper and typewriter and produce and distribute manuscripts or even purported math proofs and experimental results... hasn't been great for the scribners and alchemists, but worked out well enough for readers and modern writers and scientists.
SJ