Poor, Edmund W wrote:
What it comes down to is a tough choice between two choices: (1) We are building a free encyclopedia. Therefore, we use Wiki software. (2) We are maintaining a Wiki community. If we make some good encyclopedia articles, that's nice too.
Which is it going to be, people?
Wikipedia is clearly of type 1. I don't see how there can be any doubt about that. But it is still an interesting issue.
I think you can say that http://susning.nu/ (in Swedish) is of type 2, which is one of several differences between my project and Wikipedia. I consider individual self regulation (as opposed to enforcement of rules) to be an important part of the wiki concept, but when I'm in Wikipedia I follow Wikipedia's rules. I feel no need to rebel.
I think there is still room to create another large, general purpose wiki (type 2) in English, which doesn't have the ambition to create an encyclopedia, and where people can go that don't like Wikipedia's rules. From Wikipedia's position, this would mean walking in the opposite direction of Larry's sifter project. Starting this would be a big project, and I doubt that anybody has the energy to do it. If it was a GFDL project, it could start out with a copy of the current Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is the combination of a free encyclopedia (an old idea, as Axel Boldt can tell you) and the wiki concept. This combination can be problematic for those who don't already know both components, which is the case in many non-English languages where the Wikipedia is the first wiki that people see. Maybe this is a problem for many English Wikipedia newcomers as well.