On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 2:31 AM, Neil Kandalgaonkar <neilk(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
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?
By having content that's consistently better. It doesn't matter how
easy your site is to edit. Even if your site is so easy to edit that
you get 10% of viewers editing, 10% of your few million (at best)
viewers is still going to get you vastly worse content than a small
fraction of a percent of Wikipedia's billions. Wikipedia survives off
network effects; it's not even remotely a level playing field. People
who are focusing on things like WYSIWYG or better-quality editing
software are missing the point. You need to have better *content* to
attract viewers, before you even stand a chance of edits through your
site being meaningful.
If you somehow manage to have content that's consistently better than
Wikipedia's, though, people will figure out over time, as long as you
can maintain the quality advantage. One obvious strategy would be to
mirror Wikipedia in real time and send viewers to Wikipedia proper to
edit it, but to have more useful features or a better experience.
Maybe a better mobile site, maybe faster page load times, maybe easier
navigation or search. Maybe more content, letting people put up
vanity bios or articles about obscure webcomics that integrate more or
less seamlessly with the Wikipedia corpus. You could even compete by
putting up a better editing interface, conceivably, although auth
would be tricky to work out. If you ever got a majority of viewers
coming to your site, you could fork transparently.
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 6:59 PM, Brion Vibber <brion(a)pobox.com> wrote:
I think this isn't as useful a question as it
might be; defining a project
in terms of competing with something else leads to stagnation, not
innovation.
I agree. The correct strategy to take down Wikipedia would involve
overcoming the network effect that locks it into its current position
of dominance, and that's not something that would be useful for
Wikipedia itself to do. To fend off attacks of this sort, what you'd
want is to make your content harder to reuse, which we explicitly
*don't* want to do. Better to ask: how can we enable more people to
contribute who want to but can't be bothered?