On 8/7/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
What would you say is the most striking difference? I'd say it's a close tie between free as in open source and open as in...wiki. In most news reports I've heard the first part is less emphasized though.
I would say it's that articles are written and published by unpaid volunteers in real-time. Our flat "management structure" (ie, anarchy) certainly plays a part, but it's less central to defining us, imho.
As for relegating the role of the wiki to just "facilitating" article creation and development, what would you say it does? The wiki certainly doesn't write the articles, people do!
Well, so far, the wiki is also the presentation layer. The wiki is the *medium* - not just some dinky little article development utility.
I suppose the term "public domain" has other meanings apart from the technical "copyright free" one, but that's still damn confusing for someone who doesn't know that open source software is still copyrighted.
Yeah, very unclear.
Looking at the rest of the snippet though, I see "Open source refers to both a model of software development and an ideology of intellectual property." There again are those two things which I think are the most striking difference(s) in Wikipedia.
I don't think most Wikipedians are open source fanatics. And I don't think Wikipedia being "closed source" (say there were no db dumps, contributors retained full copyright over contributions, and there was no GFDL in play) would radically alter anything. It would reduce the motivation for many contributors, but it would not actively interfere with getting the job done.
Steve