On 9/28/09 12:53 PM, Sage Ross wrote:
As Kat Walsh alluded to on ... Facebook?!?...
free/libre real-time
services are more important than a lot of Wikimedians think (because
we've spent so long pushing back against "merely" social uses of our
wikis?). In the grand scheme of the things we care about, development
in that area may be a more critical immediate need than continued work
on MediaWiki.
The social side is quite important here too... social interaction is
probably one of the key areas we really need to improve on for
Wikipedia/Wikimedia.
No matter what else we improve technically I think we all are aware that
there are serious problems with how people interact in our community,
and that's one of the major stumbling blocks for new users.
Wikipedia has had enough success that it's bought
some time in terms
of establishing the ability (and right) of people to control and use
educational material how they want. There's still a lot to do, but
the free culture approach is starting to pick up momentum. For
so-called social networking services, it's still an uphill battle.
Yep... what I do find encouraging is that many of the big
social-networking services are picking up on the idea that easy
interoperability is a win for everyone a lot quicker than, say, the IM
wars of the 2000s or the email wars of the late 80s/early 90s. (Remember
when CompuServer and AOL users couldn't email each other? Hah!) But
that's something that could disappear quickly as long as it's a world
where there's only a small number of big players...
-- brion