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.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se