On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 12:36 PM, wiki doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
[...] If I dare to be a seer, I worry about software that looks increasingly 2004 in a Facebook world.
Let me focus that a bit, if you don't mind -
Craigslist looks like 1997; other than the occasional image change for the logo, Google's main search page and its results look like about 2000 still (and not much different, to me, than AltaVista did shortly after it launched, though it's subtly better in many ways).
Yahoo has a lot more modern interface design than its competitors; it must be successful, right?
I believe that from a user (reader) point of view, Wikipedia is suitably capable from an interface standpoint.
From a user (editor) point of view, there is a distinct remaining lack
of WYSIWIG and steep learning curve. Our existing editor base are "used to it", but I always wonder if we're not losing significant potential contributors from the Facebook generation who aren't willing to put up with learning our syntax.
General worry? No. Discouraged potential contributor worry? Yes.
And I'd be interested to wonder what other nightmares of the future keep the Wiki-saints in fear and trembling.
Community actually hitting a consensus management barrier, though I predict we'd muddle through a representative system of some sort if push came to shove.
Someone (else) doing a WYSIWIG, sematic / fact based competitor with at least equal participant community access and a dump of our database as a seed point, with a way for them to do AI-scanned update management from the Wikipedia pages.
Expanding - Wikipedia is several things - an online encyclopedia (the actual article content, images, etc), a software system for managing that content, and a community that does the management. What's functionally critical are the content and the community, though the software is an enabler. If people could walk across the street to NextPedia and have a really snazzy UI experience to updating the shared content and still have the supportive and managing functions of the community...
Wikipedia NG discussions are a perennial favorite, and always hit a tactical wall. Strategically, I feel that's a mistake. Not that I can wave a magic wand and fix it, but it always worries me.
On 21 December 2010 20:51, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia NG discussions are a perennial favorite, and always hit a tactical wall. Strategically, I feel that's a mistake. Not that I can wave a magic wand and fix it, but it always worries me.
It's annoying, because we need competitors. Being a monopoly is not good for us and is not good for the mission. Here's something I sent to foundation-l yesterday (no responses so far):
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Date: 20 December 2010 20:59 Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Tendrl to Knowino To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
On 20 December 2010 19:47, Noein pronoein@gmail.com wrote:
Is there a general consensus about achieving a monopoly as a good goal. Is this part of some public strategy? Is this the position of WMF? Of chapters? I thought I heard some weeks ago on that mail list that diversity is good. That competitors are healthy. Could we have a clarification of positions about this?
I can't speak for anyone but myself - but I think, and I've seen many others who express an opinion think, that competition would be good and monopoly as *the* encyclopedia is not intrinsically a good thing.
The big win would be to make proper free content licenses - preferably public domain, CC-by, CC-by-sa, as they're the most common - the *normal* way to distribute educational and academic materials. Because that would fulfill the Foundation mission statement -
"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment."
- without us having to do every bit of it. And really, that mission statement cannot be attained unless we make free content *normal and expected*, and everyone else joins in.
Furthermore, being *the* encyclopedia is mostly a headache for us. Wikipedia wasn't started with the aim of running a hugely popular website, whose popularity has gone beyond merely "famous", beyond merely "mainstream", to being part of the assumed background. We're an institution now - part of the scenery. This has made every day for the last eight years a very special "wtf" moment technically. It means we can't run an encyclopedia out of Jimbo's spare change any more and need to run fundraisers, to remind the world that this institution is actually a rather small-to-medium-sized charity.
(I think reaching this state was predictable. I said a few years ago that in ten years, the only encyclopedia would be Wikipedia or something directly derived from Wikipedia. I think this is the case, and I don't think it's necessarily a good thing.)
So I'd say, no - monopoly isn't a goal for us, it's something that's happened. We need to encourage everyone else to take on the goal of our mission with their own educational, scientific, academic etc materials. We can't change the world all on our own.
The next question is what to do about this. Deliberately crippling Wikipedia would be silly, of course. But encouraging the propagation of proper free content licences - which is somewhat more restrictive than what our most excellent friends at Creative Commons do, though they're an ideal organisation to work with on it - directly helps our mission, for example.
As I said, I can't speak for anyone else, but if anyone here disagrees I'm open to correction on any of the above.
- d.
Pride matters, arrogance is harmful. What we have achieved is to demonstrate that legitimate, free, open, collaborative knowledge is to be taken seriously, and some knowhow about its creation and maintenance. That's not a reason for arrogance and does not mean we are "best" or have some kind of guarantee for future.
Commercially, enterprises often flourish in an ecosystem of similar enterprises or related needs. Those lacking competitors and alternatives tend over years and decades to become lazy, inefficient, and complacent. Those with others around have the "best the rest of the world can devise" to measure up to, compare with, and provoke improvement.
Like others have said, we need others around. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but for the future.
FT2
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 9:12 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 21 December 2010 20:51, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia NG discussions are a perennial favorite, and always hit a tactical wall. Strategically, I feel that's a mistake. Not that I can wave a magic wand and fix it, but it always worries me.
It's annoying, because we need competitors. Being a monopoly is not good for us and is not good for the mission. Here's something I sent to foundation-l yesterday (no responses so far):
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Date: 20 December 2010 20:59 Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Tendrl to Knowino To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
On 20 December 2010 19:47, Noein pronoein@gmail.com wrote:
Is there a general consensus about achieving a monopoly as a good goal. Is this part of some public strategy? Is this the position of WMF? Of chapters? I thought I heard some weeks ago on that mail list that diversity is good. That competitors are healthy. Could we have a clarification of positions about this?
I can't speak for anyone but myself - but I think, and I've seen many others who express an opinion think, that competition would be good and monopoly as *the* encyclopedia is not intrinsically a good thing.
The big win would be to make proper free content licenses - preferably public domain, CC-by, CC-by-sa, as they're the most common - the *normal* way to distribute educational and academic materials. Because that would fulfill the Foundation mission statement -
"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment."
- without us having to do every bit of it. And really, that mission
statement cannot be attained unless we make free content *normal and expected*, and everyone else joins in.
Furthermore, being *the* encyclopedia is mostly a headache for us. Wikipedia wasn't started with the aim of running a hugely popular website, whose popularity has gone beyond merely "famous", beyond merely "mainstream", to being part of the assumed background. We're an institution now - part of the scenery. This has made every day for the last eight years a very special "wtf" moment technically. It means we can't run an encyclopedia out of Jimbo's spare change any more and need to run fundraisers, to remind the world that this institution is actually a rather small-to-medium-sized charity.
(I think reaching this state was predictable. I said a few years ago that in ten years, the only encyclopedia would be Wikipedia or something directly derived from Wikipedia. I think this is the case, and I don't think it's necessarily a good thing.)
So I'd say, no - monopoly isn't a goal for us, it's something that's happened. We need to encourage everyone else to take on the goal of our mission with their own educational, scientific, academic etc materials. We can't change the world all on our own.
The next question is what to do about this. Deliberately crippling Wikipedia would be silly, of course. But encouraging the propagation of proper free content licences - which is somewhat more restrictive than what our most excellent friends at Creative Commons do, though they're an ideal organisation to work with on it - directly helps our mission, for example.
As I said, I can't speak for anyone else, but if anyone here disagrees I'm open to correction on any of the above.
- d.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 1:47 PM, FT2 ft2.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Pride matters, arrogance is harmful. What we have achieved is to demonstrate that legitimate, free, open, collaborative knowledge is to be taken seriously, and some knowhow about its creation and maintenance. That's not a reason for arrogance and does not mean we are "best" or have some kind of guarantee for future.
Commercially, enterprises often flourish in an ecosystem of similar enterprises or related needs. Those lacking competitors and alternatives tend over years and decades to become lazy, inefficient, and complacent. Those with others around have the "best the rest of the world can devise" to measure up to, compare with, and provoke improvement.
Like others have said, we need others around. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but for the future.
There are two schools of thought here -
One, that competition is always great and effective.
Two, that sometimes a natural monopoly develops of some sort, and that for the time that the paradigm remains valid there's really only one player of note.
The Internet sees examples of both types of activity.
Google has search competitors, by dint of Yahoo not having gone bankrupt quite yet and Microsoft having thrown Bing in as the default search engine for the OS of choice for 90% plus of the computers sold today (plus a lot of phones). A lot of people want it to be in Category One, but it seems to be at least marginally a Category Two case.
Craigslist killed a whole paradigm (classified ads in print newspapers) and has not evolved any useful competition. Ebay took the rest of that market, and invented a new market, and has not had any credible competitor. Both are Category Two.
Amazon invented its field, but has active competition (Borders, B&N at least). Clearly Category One.
The Internet Archive has no (public) competition. Nobody's even interested.
The social network website arena has had intense competition, which is settling down into a Category Two monopoly around Facebook. Twitter fused SMS with broadcast and has not evolved any competition; Category Two again.
Skype is only one of many internet phone services now.
For nonprofit / public service organizations, there's an ulterior motive in any case. Two, actually... The exterior ulterior motive is helping other people, and the not-so-secret personal or interior ulterior motive, that people enjoy being seen as contributors and participants, it's an ego boost.
Neither of those ulterior motives is like the motives for a business, which are primarily to make money (preserve and gain market share and margins).
We have analogs to "market share" and "margins" but they're not the same.
Because they're not the same, some of the inertial resistance to change is different and operates in different mechanisms. Wikipedia remakes itself regularly, though there are longterm participants, rules, and goals. We change the software, editing standards, our IP license, community membership and active editors set, community participation and rules. We actively and moderately skeptically review all the policy and core values in the community.
Because of that, I think we're more effective at responding to pressure to change than a typical business. In some ways we aren't - we lack "leadership" in many senses of the word, though we have leaders who people listen to and who focus discussion and debate. But we aren't institutionally opposed to changing things to make them better. We don't need an external competitor to tell us that we have problems, to the degree businesses often do.
I won't pretend that we're really good at it; the community is analagous to herding cats in many ways, and people are resistant to change at times and in some ways. But I think we're better enough, in some key ways.
On competition:
In terms of on-line encyclopedias Wikipedia has no effective competition. If you sit to research, you'll look at Wikipedia. If you want to contribute it will be Wikipedia.
But..... where we are in competition with others is for the time of the undergraduate/graduate who sits down to squander some time on the internet. He's got any number of choices - what we draw him to Wikipedia and make him stick around? I wonder that the downturn in Wikipedia contributions is due largely to their being more "grown up" social networking phenomena than there were in 2004. Now, it is tempting to say that the fact that the "myspacers" have buggered off is not bad thing - but I wonder how many intelligent, educated people are now squandering time on Facebook who once might have been Wikipedia contributors? As Facebook adds bells and whistles and Wikipedia's interface becomes more tired and (relatively) less friendly to new users - does this continue?
How much is the Foundation investing in software development? I was appalled last year to discover that the flagship of flagged revisions had been entrusted to some guy named Aaron who was doing it between exams! How do you ever hope to keep up if that's the level of commitment to development? (No disrespect to Aaron who was probably working his butt off!)
On ability to adapt:
I could not disagree more with GWH here. I think en.wp greatest weakness is that it is largely leaderless, and tied to a consensus model that simply doesn't allow for change much at all.
To quote myself (a real sign of vanity) "Wikipedia isn't governed by the thoughtful or the informed - it is governed by anyone who turns up. ... There are a larger group who are too immature or lazy to think straight. And then there are all those who recognise "something must be done", but perpetually oppose the something that's being proposed in favour of a "better idea". The mechanism is rather like using a chatshow phone-in to manage the intricacies of a federal budget - it does not work for issues that need time, thought, responsibility and attention. I doubt this problem can be fixed - since it needs structural change to decision making - which is impossible for precisely the same reasons."
Scott
-----Original Message----- From: wikien-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of George Herbert Sent: 21 December 2010 22:09 To: English Wikipedia Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
There are two schools of thought here -
One, that competition is always great and effective.
Two, that sometimes a natural monopoly develops of some sort, and that for the time that the paradigm remains valid there's really only one player of note.
The Internet sees examples of both types of activity.
Google has search competitors, by dint of Yahoo not having gone bankrupt quite yet and Microsoft having thrown Bing in as the default search engine for the OS of choice for 90% plus of the computers sold today (plus a lot of phones). A lot of people want it to be in Category One, but it seems to be at least marginally a Category Two case.
Craigslist killed a whole paradigm (classified ads in print newspapers) and has not evolved any useful competition. Ebay took the rest of that market, and invented a new market, and has not had any credible competitor. Both are Category Two.
Amazon invented its field, but has active competition (Borders, B&N at least). Clearly Category One.
The Internet Archive has no (public) competition. Nobody's even interested.
The social network website arena has had intense competition, which is settling down into a Category Two monopoly around Facebook. Twitter fused SMS with broadcast and has not evolved any competition; Category Two again.
Skype is only one of many internet phone services now.
For nonprofit / public service organizations, there's an ulterior motive in any case. Two, actually... The exterior ulterior motive is helping other people, and the not-so-secret personal or interior ulterior motive, that people enjoy being seen as contributors and participants, it's an ego boost.
Neither of those ulterior motives is like the motives for a business, which are primarily to make money (preserve and gain market share and margins).
We have analogs to "market share" and "margins" but they're not the same.
Because they're not the same, some of the inertial resistance to change is different and operates in different mechanisms. Wikipedia remakes itself regularly, though there are longterm participants, rules, and goals. We change the software, editing standards, our IP license, community membership and active editors set, community participation and rules. We actively and moderately skeptically review all the policy and core values in the community.
Because of that, I think we're more effective at responding to pressure to change than a typical business. In some ways we aren't - we lack "leadership" in many senses of the word, though we have leaders who people listen to and who focus discussion and debate. But we aren't institutionally opposed to changing things to make them better. We don't need an external competitor to tell us that we have problems, to the degree businesses often do.
I won't pretend that we're really good at it; the community is analagous to herding cats in many ways, and people are resistant to change at times and in some ways. But I think we're better enough, in some key ways.
On 12/21/10 1:12 PM, David Gerard wrote:
I can't speak for anyone but myself - but I think, and I've seen many others who express an opinion think, that competition would be good and monopoly as *the* encyclopedia is not intrinsically a good thing.
I can't agree more. To this end, Wikipedia should be encouraging forks, encouraging other sites to copy articles into other wikis which in turn could edit them into something consistent with the new site's philosophies. Being the sole arbiter of NPOV can lead to very un-neutral results. Where other sites have been copying and developing articles in their own way, WP could even have interwiki links to these other sites.
The big win would be to make proper free content licenses - preferably public domain, CC-by, CC-by-sa, as they're the most common - the *normal* way to distribute educational and academic materials.
I don't see licensing as a big barrier.
Because that would fulfill the Foundation mission statement -
"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment."
- without us having to do every bit of it. And really, that mission
statement cannot be attained unless we make free content *normal and expected*, and everyone else joins in.
The initiative must still come from those who would run those sites. Perhaps Sanger could have succeeded if he had put more chips in his site than on his shoulder. For many, seeing the kind of budget that the WMF finds necessary can also be an intimidating factor. They could start with a narrower topic-specific project, but all still need to come to terms with the realities of financing their own site.
Furthermore, being *the* encyclopedia is mostly a headache for us. Wikipedia wasn't started with the aim of running a hugely popular website, whose popularity has gone beyond merely "famous", beyond merely "mainstream", to being part of the assumed background. We're an institution now - part of the scenery. This has made every day for the last eight years a very special "wtf" moment technically. It means we can't run an encyclopedia out of Jimbo's spare change any more and need to run fundraisers, to remind the world that this institution is actually a rather small-to-medium-sized charity.
(I think reaching this state was predictable. I said a few years ago that in ten years, the only encyclopedia would be Wikipedia or something directly derived from Wikipedia. I think this is the case, and I don't think it's necessarily a good thing.)
It's in the nature of institutions to seek uninhibited growth without the need to say so. Business strives for a bigger market share as an indicator of success. Since the total market share is always 100% that can only come at the expense of others.
So I'd say, no - monopoly isn't a goal for us, it's something that's happened. We need to encourage everyone else to take on the goal of our mission with their own educational, scientific, academic etc materials. We can't change the world all on our own.
The next question is what to do about this. Deliberately crippling Wikipedia would be silly, of course. But encouraging the propagation of proper free content licences - which is somewhat more restrictive than what our most excellent friends at Creative Commons do, though they're an ideal organisation to work with on it - directly helps our mission, for example.
One of the most vibrant things that still happens is the independent development of other language Wikipedias without the need to have an exact copy of what appears in a dominant language.
Media-wiki software is fully available to these other sites.
Instructions on "How to start your wiki" could also be helpful.
Ec
On 28 December 2010 03:07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
(I think reaching this state was predictable. I said a few years ago that in ten years, the only encyclopedia would be Wikipedia or something directly derived from Wikipedia. I think this is the case, and I don't think it's necessarily a good thing.)
It's in the nature of institutions to seek uninhibited growth without the need to say so. Business strives for a bigger market share as an indicator of success. Since the total market share is always 100% that can only come at the expense of others.
An important point here: we never actually sought this. It just happened this way!
- d.
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 3:07 AM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
On 12/21/10 1:12 PM, David Gerard wrote:
I can't speak for anyone but myself - but I think, and I've seen many others who express an opinion think, that competition would be good and monopoly as *the* encyclopedia is not intrinsically a good thing.
I can't agree more. To this end, Wikipedia should be encouraging forks, encouraging other sites to copy articles into other wikis which in turn could edit them into something consistent with the new site's philosophies. Being the sole arbiter of NPOV can lead to very un-neutral results. Where other sites have been copying and developing articles in their own way, WP could even have interwiki links to these other sites.
<snip>
The initiative must still come from those who would run those sites.
Indeed. Just out of interest, how many people here would consider devoting the time and energy and resources into setting up a Wikipedia fork? I know some active Wikipedians have done so, but sustaining such forks can be very difficult. What practical steps can be taken to encourage a diversity of useful and sustainable forks that demonstrate what is and is not possible? Or is th etime better spent improving WMF projects?
Carcharoth
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 3:07 AM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
On 12/21/10 1:12 PM, David Gerard wrote:
I can't speak for anyone but myself - but I think, and I've seen many others who express an opinion think, that competition would be good and monopoly as *the* encyclopedia is not intrinsically a good thing.
I can't agree more. To this end, Wikipedia should be encouraging forks, encouraging other sites to copy articles into other wikis which in turn could edit them into something consistent with the new site's philosophies. Being the sole arbiter of NPOV can lead to very un-neutral results. Where other sites have been copying and developing articles in their own way, WP could even have interwiki links to these other sites.
<snip>
The initiative must still come from those who would run those sites.
Indeed. Just out of interest, how many people here would consider devoting the time and energy and resources into setting up a Wikipedia fork? I know some active Wikipedians have done so, but sustaining such forks can be very difficult. What practical steps can be taken to encourage a diversity of useful and sustainable forks that demonstrate what is and is not possible? Or is th etime better spent improving WMF projects?
Carcharoth
I'm not available for serious sustained work on any fork but Wikinfo, but I can help people get set up. There has to be a vision though, of something better. Maybe something that is an actual wiki, quick and easy, rather than the template coding hell Wikipedia's turned into.
Fred Bauder
On 28 December 2010 05:04, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
There has to be a vision though, of something better. Maybe something that is an actual wiki, quick and easy, rather than the template coding hell Wikipedia's turned into.
That's not the mission statement for a thousand forks - but it does sound like the mission statement for WYSIWYG that works.
- d.
On 12/27/10 9:04 PM, Fred Bauder wrote:
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 3:07 AM, Ray Saintongesaintonge@telus.net wrote:
On 12/21/10 1:12 PM, David Gerard wrote:
I can't speak for anyone but myself - but I think, and I've seen many others who express an opinion think, that competition would be good and monopoly as *the* encyclopedia is not intrinsically a good thing.
I can't agree more. To this end, Wikipedia should be encouraging forks, encouraging other sites to copy articles into other wikis which in turn could edit them into something consistent with the new site's philosophies. Being the sole arbiter of NPOV can lead to very un-neutral results. Where other sites have been copying and developing articles in their own way, WP could even have interwiki links to these other sites.
<snip>
The initiative must still come from those who would run those sites.
Indeed. Just out of interest, how many people here would consider devoting the time and energy and resources into setting up a Wikipedia fork? I know some active Wikipedians have done so, but sustaining such forks can be very difficult. What practical steps can be taken to encourage a diversity of useful and sustainable forks that demonstrate what is and is not possible? Or is th etime better spent improving WMF projects?
Carcharoth
I'm not available for serious sustained work on any fork but Wikinfo, but I can help people get set up. There has to be a vision though, of something better. Maybe something that is an actual wiki, quick and easy, rather than the template coding hell Wikipedia's turned into.
Absolutely. It comes down to two issues: What Wikimedia *can* provide, and what the new project *must* provide. In addition to funding the new project must indeed provide a vision. A working WYSIWYG is indeed one such possibility, but the mediawiki software may not be so helpful to them.
My idea was somewhat more modest in that it was content based. Although it would not reflect my personal philosophy something like Conservapedia is something to be encouraged. It's vision would likely only allow a limited and manageable subset of Wikipedia articles. Interwiki links from Wikipedia to that project could be given for those who would like an alternative view of the subject with the understanding that the other project may not be bound by NPOV.
Ec