The other day, I read the [[:en:Wikileaks]] article on Wikipedia. What it said was, more or less, that Wilileaks is a leaks website that used to be a wiki. And I wondered : how long will it take before we read somewhere : Wikipedia, the Pedia that used to be a Wiki ?
Sooner than you might think.
Just yesterday, someone reported a mistake at the French village pump : a castle was located at the wrong location on the new toolserver.org/~kolossos/openlayers map tool. That castle, called "Pierrefonds Castle", should be located in the Pierrefonds town, not in Senlis town, like the Windsor castle is located in the town of Windsor to the exclusion of any other English town.
I thought this was the time to show the power of a wiki : a cool website everybody can edit, especially useful to instantly correct straightforward mistakes like that one.
The toolserver.org/~kolossos/openlayers software is cute enough to provide "source: ru" at the bottom of the little popup window that pops up when you click on the wrongly located castle. I instantly corrected the wrong coordinates on the Russian language version of Wikipedia (1) which had the mistake.
We are more or less 24 hours (19 hours, exactly) after I corrected the mistake, but the toolserver.org/~kolossos/openlayers is still wrong. This is not what a wiki is supposed to be.
There are 2 potential reasons. A) The Russian Wikipedia uses "Flagged revisions" and my newbie edit might be ignored by whoever wants to ignore it because it is flagged as a non-flagged newbie edit.B) the toolserver.org/~kolossos/openlayers software might be too slow to perform updates.
Whatever the reason, this is evidence that Wikipedia is changing into something that is not a wiki.
I am wondering if the whole problem is not the sheer idea of having "developers" doing their job : "developping". Developping means changing. If you change a wiki, you have 99% of chances that what it changes into is not a wiki.
This was my first anti-developer rant of 2011. Happy new year everybody.
(1) http://ru.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%D0%9F%D1%8C%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%84%D0%...