On 12/29/2010 08:31 AM, 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:
This is a foolish discussion for two reasons. First, wikitech-l is a technical list, and not suited for talk on organizational change. Second, innovation doesn't come from within. Encyclopaedia Britannica didn't invent Wikipedia, AT&T didn't invent the Internet, Gorbachev didn't succeed in implementing competition within the communist party (although he tried), and dinosaurs weren't invited to the design committee for the surviving mammals. If there is a new alternative to Wikipedia, we, the subscribers to wikitech-l, are not invited to design it.
What we can easily achieve is to make bureaucracy so slow and rigid (and our discussions derailed, like now) that more people will leave WMF projects. But this is not enough to create a working alternative.