2010/12/29 MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com
Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
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.
It's simply evolution rule! The day this would happen - that something will appear, collecting all the best from wiki, adding too something better and successful - wiki will slowly disappear. But all the better of wiki will survive into the emerging "species".... where's the problem, you you don't consider wiki in terms of competition, but in terms of utiliy? I'm actively working for wiki principles, not at all for wiki project! I hope, that this will be not considered offensive for wiki community.
Alex