2010-12-29 08:31, Neil Kandalgaonkar:
I've been inspired by the discussion David Gerard
and Brion Vibber
kicked off, and I think they are headed in the right direction.
But I just want to ask a separate, but related question.
Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you
are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be
paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following:
1 - Become a more attractive home to the WP editors. Get them to work on
your content.
2 - Take the free content from WP, and use it in this new system. But
make it much better, in a way Wikipedia can't match.
3 - Attract even more readers, or perhaps a niche group of
super-passionate readers that you can use to build a new community.
In other words, if you had no legacy, and just wanted to build something
from zero, how would you go about creating an innovation that was
disruptive to Wikipedia, in fact something that made Wikipedia look like
Friendster or Myspace compared to Facebook?
And there's a followup question to this -- but you're all smart people
and can guess what it is.
If one would have a budget of gazillions of dollars then it would be
quite easy ;-). The problem is - what would be the point of investing
such money if you wouldn't get it back from this investment?
If you wouldn't have such money (mostly to pay users for creating
content), then the most problematic part would be to convince community
you are OK. IMHO this has nothing to do with usability or any such thing
it's rather a matter of gaining trust. A part from that you would have
to make all (or almost all) the things that work now work. If you would
make a brand new software then you would have to rewrite at least most
popular user scripts which would alone be a lot work. You would probably
also have to make a nice WYSIWYG to make your site worth moving to. To
make it worth to change at least some of user habits. Not to mention
your site would need to build on a quikcly scalable infrastructure to
guarantee high availabilty (at least as high as Wikipedia is).
In general, you have to remember that even if something is technically
better it's not guaranteed to be successful. For example I think that DP
(
pgdp.net) and Rastko are technically better equiped for proofreading
then Wikisource, but I guess for thoose already familiar with MediaWiki
it's easier to create texts for Wikisource.
Regards,
Nux.