2010/12/29 MZMcBride <z(a)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