On 7/18/06, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
I think it is more to do with Wikipedia's ability to adapt and change with developing technology. If Encyclopedia Britannica had created a wiki back in 2000, Wikipedia may not exist and Britannica would have extended their lifetime by a few decades.
"It's not the technology. It's the social structure, stupid". Although Wikipedia is about building an encyclopedia and not about a building a community, without our social structure our project could not be a success. 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.
There is always the chance that they'll adapt... I'm not expecting them to go away any time soon.. It's still a useful resource, is so much as something which isn't instantly available to more than an infinitesimal fraction of the world can be...
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As long as we are willing to embrace changes and developments (such as, at the moment, Wiktionary Z and Semantic MediaWiki) and don't object for reasons of familiarity, we should do fine.
To add some contrast: Just because you die out without some changes, does not mean all changes should be accepted. In biology we find that most mutations are harmful.
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.
I can't suggest a real solution to this today, but I think that one of the things we already to today helps the situation somewhat: do as much as possible without modifying Mediawiki. And with bots, toolserver, templates, manual, and quasi-manual processes... we're already doing that.
I'm wary of software which grants someone who merely has working code the ability to control long term direction of the project. Enwiki folks are very concerned about the consolidation of 'power' that comes from combining a bcrat and a arbcom member in one usrs.... Good thing that developers are under the radar, because with the ability to make wide scale decisions without consensus that comes from a patch is pretty much unparalleled. But I suppose thats why we don't have any developers on the Wikimedia Foundation board.