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