On 30 December 2010 00:27, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
You could even compete by putting up a better editing interface, conceivably, although auth would be tricky to work out.
You know, this is something that would be extremely easy to experiment with right now,
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 6:59 PM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
I think this isn't as useful a question as it might be; defining a project in terms of competing with something else leads to stagnation, not innovation.
I agree. The correct strategy to take down Wikipedia would involve overcoming the network effect that locks it into its current position of dominance, and that's not something that would be useful for Wikipedia itself to do. To fend off attacks of this sort, what you'd want is to make your content harder to reuse, which we explicitly *don't* want to do. Better to ask: how can we enable more people to contribute who want to but can't be bothered?
Making Wikipedia easy to mirror and fork is the best protection I can think of for the content itself. It also keeps the support structures (Foundation) and community good and honest. Comparison: People keep giving Red Hat money; Debian continues despite a prominent and successful fork (Ubuntu), and quite a bit goes back from the fork (both pull and push).
- d.