On Dec 28, 2010 11:31 PM, "Neil Kandalgaonkar" neilk@wikimedia.org wrote:
I've been inspired by the discussion David Gerard and Brion Vibber kicked off, and I think they are headed in the right direction.
But I just want to ask a separate, but related question.
Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you
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.
A better question might be: what would be a project that would help people involving freely distributable and modifiable educational and reference materials, that you could create with today and tomorrow's tech and sufficient resources, that doesn't exist or work well today?
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
"In dotCommunist Ew Ork, Aris, and Ome, Wikipedia disrupts you!"
Suggestion: Set the sights a little higher, and I'd say start by ditching the "disruption" metaphor, which is fine and good for firms, but less sensible in a landscape that's already massively and "organically" distributed (I'm thinking of the free culture movement as a whole). If the rhetorical question is "how to build a better encyclopedia?" or "how to further the WMF's mission?" -- here's something: how about some specific and well-thought out proposals and a way to discuss them that doesn't devolve to some sort of punditry pissing contest? Like, a UserVoice-style feedback system (instead of this: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bugzilla#Requesting_a_feature) and clear way to keep track of project and subproject progress (Redmine?), including a way to make sense of the priorities and other trends that govern progress on the current set of open bugs (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=status%3Aopen).
In real simple terms, know thyself!
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