2008/7/14 Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se:
If you start a project on the basis that Wikipedia is too complicated, you are likely to fool yourself. Your project will be different only as long as (1) it is far younger than Wikipedia and/or (2) it has attracted far fewer people than Wikipedia. For a successful project, you want neither of these. You need a way to keep a project simple *despite* attracting lots of users and accumulating over time. Maybe you have that formula, only time can tell. The wonder of Wikipedia is that it isn't far more complicated than it is. Ask some people who work on industrial development projects involving the same amount of people and time, and you'll find many examples that have been faster in accumulating complexity ([[Cruft]], feature creep).
Yes. Wikipedia's problems are largely emergent features of an experiment, rather than a matter of negligent design of an engineered product.
See also http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Instruction_creep and understand why it's so.
- d.