On 27/02/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 2/27/07 3:51 PM, Gwern Branwen at gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
If you want to force the community in a direction, then code is the most effective way. It is not very polite or considerate, but it certainly works.
Your entire post intimidated me ;-) and bullied me :-) into reading more Lessig - thanks. The section I pulled out above intrigues the hell out of me; I would love to know more.
Developers have inordinate power, so it's probably just as well they're uniformly noble-spirited ;-) They shape the virtual world we're working in here.
Also, it's a good way to lure people into coding - if there's just this one feature that would make MediaWiki lovely, then writing it is probably the best way to get it, because we're desperately short of developers.
(I'm trying to think of good reading on the subject. The Cunctator wrote quite a rant about it in the early days of Wikipedia which is still up on nostalgia.wikipedia.org somewhere. There's undoubtedly a pile of academic and semi-academic papers on the subject.)
- d.