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.
[quote] The "Viable alternative to Wikipedia" isn't going to be another Mediawiki site, in any event - it's going to be something that someone puts some real effort into developing the software for, not to mention the user experience... [/quote]
http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=31808&view=findpost&p...
I largely agree with that.
You can't make more than broad generalizations about what a "Wikipedia killer" would be. If there were a concrete answer or set of answers, Wikipedia would be dead already. A number of organizations and companies have tried to replicate Wikipedia's success (e.g. Wikia) with varying degrees of success. The most common factor to past Wikipedia competitors has been MediaWiki (though if someone can refute this, please do). To me (and others), that leaves the question of what would happen if you wrote some software that was actually built for making an encyclopedia, rather than the jack of all trades product that MediaWiki is.
As for follow-up questions, be explicit.
MZMcBride