On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 11:01 PM, Samuel Klein sj@wikimedia.org wrote:
Amazing list of potential allies, partners and new projects. You guys all seem very on top of things, all in the mentioned list looked great and sounded like exciting good fits for us-- from a Wikimedian perspective at least.
There have been various proposals for an 'argument wiki' over the years, but I've never seen a working implementation.
See, that's the thing about new projects. Right now, we treat them like a shuttle launch-- everything has to be absolutely perfect for us to grant launch clearance. This, of course, was how we had to do things in the old days, when wikis were expensive and we were poor.
But now, I feel like we may be able to move back into an era of rapid experimentation, where new projects are more like unmanned 1940s test rockets-- they should be blowing up left and right, as we try to learn from the failed attempts.
I'll go further-- provided we can do so cheaply, I want new projects that are like the ridiculous early failures of flight. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7OJvv4LG9M]. I want to hear about a new WMF project and it's policy, think "That's crazy-- that's never gonna get off the ground", and indeed, learn something from whether it crashes or whether it actually takes off.
Having an "early flight era" attitude is how we can find something even better than Wikipedia. I agree a lot of ideas are unlikely to work-- but provided the resource usage is sufficiently negligible, let people start making insane flying machine projects, and eventually the wright brothers will show up.
Success is not the only reason to start a project. Constructive failure is a valid goal too.
Alec