On 12 August 2011 13:37, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
My point is that making it easy to fork does not create good competitors. Good competitors come from elsewhere. And they will come, if we do not deploy WISIWIG, not lower the entrance barrier for novices, not make it harder to troll out respectable users, and not find a way to make connections to academia or otherwise considerably improve the quality.
Oh, absolutely. The other thing they'd need is an actual sizable editing community, big enough to take on the task. Citizendium failed to achieve this, for example, and ended up deleting most of the articles they'd forked from Wikipedia.
I'm pointing out that the technical ability is also a prerequisite. Even if you have the other stuff, the ability to do it at all needs to be present. Technical forkability is explicitly acknowledged by the tech team as obviously the Right Thing, and it's why WMF is so gung-ho about open source everything; the trouble is actually putting it into practice in a resource-restricted environment. It's a variety of technical debt [*].
WYSIWYG is in progress. Moon shot ahoy!
Academics appear to be coming to us, despite our inability to keep idiots out of experts' faces. Or out of respectable users' faces. Or out of anyone's face. A dissolution of the "expert problem" I hadn't been expecting.
- d.
[*] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt - the shortcuts you take to get something working, knowing you need to fix them later if not now. Numerical measure and accounting is tricky, but the analogy to financial debt is surprisingly useful.