On 12/08/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/12/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
But there are some vague notions of *lots* of alternate Wikipedia distributions (rather than "forks"), analogous to Linux distributions. This bit seems like an interesting idea, but I'm not quite sure how one would approach it. Categories as packages? (like an .rpm or a .deb .) Is there something here that's the seed of a useful idea?
Yes and no. Full forks are pretty much imposible. Maintianing something the size if wikipedia is going to be beyond the rescources of a group just starting out and the momentum from the existing articles is going to prevent rapid chages. What forks there are will cover narrow subject areas. For those that want a different POV they will have to start from scratch. This already happens.
Mmm. I'm thinking of a "category" as a Wikireader-style chunk. For example, I came up with most of the category tree under [[Category:Scientology]]. Think of that category and its subcats as a wikireader on that subject. The usual analogous open source term would be "package."
Linux analogy: A Wikipedia distro would have a maintainer for each package - their job would be to pull stable versions of the package from the Wikipedia tree for their distro. You could have distros aiming for stable reliability in a conservative fashion by picking stable, reviewed article versions for their category packages and reviewing them themselves. You could have distros that ride the edge a little more, taking what Wikipedia declares "okay versions" and putting those together as a distro. You could have the all-performance cracksmoking bleeding-edge version, which would be the live perpetual-draft wiki ;-)
FreeBSD analogy: FreeBSD 4.x gets only security fixes - it's obsolete. FreeBSD 5.x gets security fixes and some bug fixes but is regarded as stabilised. FreeBSD 6.x is the current production version and gets bug and security fixes, but is regarded as stable for production use. FreeBSD CVS is very current but may be broken at any time. An analogy to this would be a stable repackage of the core Wikipedia (whatever that is), with optional packages available as ports, with maintainers per port as per the Linux analogy. That is, you can leave out Pokemon if it offends your sensibilities but not lose the history of France or obscure failed computer technologies of the 1990s. This would give a Wikipedia people could download for personal use without having to buy 8 gigabytes of SD cards.
Inside Wikipedia, "package maintainers" would be analogous to wikiprojects. Note the important difference that in software, a maintainer or project lead has veto; on Wikipedia, even if I wrote every word of an article and have maintained it for a year, I don't control that article and don't have veto (though I'm likely to have opinions and express them). But a wikiproject, a group of people signing up to polish up an area, is made a more explicit part of the structure of editing. This has its ups (more solid work on an area) and downs (more politics, more chance of POV drift).
Do these ideas sound like they're going anywhere useful?
- d.