We are not competing with any other web site, or organization, and there is no reason for us to think of it that way. We are part of the capitalist world only in the sense that our physical operations must exist within it.
We are trying to build a particular project for a common purpose--not to rank among the best or most widely used sites on the web, but to provide the best free encyclopedia that our method of working can provide. Other online encyclopedias are not our competitors: they are rather synergistic. Citizendium is perhaps most valuable for having showed us a path we should not follow--elaborate bureaucracy and expert editing--but in a more positive sense did highlight the need for us to improve article quality. That Baidu is more widely used by its target audience is to some extent due to political and censorship considerations, but is also due to its greater size , and shows the importance of having very wide-ranging content of importance to the users.
There is however a sense in which our very wide use is beneficial, and our rank among web sites is important for morale: we want to know that our work is being used. But whether we are 5th or 10th does not matter. It does not affect our usefulness or our value. it might to some extent cause some public interest, and thus attract users--but they will remain users if they find what they want, not because of our relative position.
The only sense in which we compete is that our project competes for the pool of available and interested volunteer workers. We will grow better by increasing the total pool, by showing the success of such efforts and styles of operation as ours. The more such projects, the more people will be interested in them overall. Even in the commercial world, the success of automobile or computer companies lay primarily in increasing the demand for automobiles or computers, and only secondarily by competing against each other.
The basic reason why doing things by staff rather than volunteers is wrong is that it decreases one of the motivations for volunteering--the knowledge that one can participate significantly in not just the work but the decisions, and become influential in whatever activity within the project that one chooses.
On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 5:37 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 11:32 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 10:58 AM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
Who is WMF competing with?
User attention.
Sorry, misread "who" with "what".
Presently, with top ~20 sites for user attention.
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