[Foundation-l] Paths (was Analysis of statistics)

[Milos Rancic]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 6:42 PM, Marc Riddell<michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> And it is this control group, this "consolidation of power" which was
> described earlier in this discussion, that is keeping the Project from
> reaching its full potential. This issue has been brought up many times in
> the past, but each time has been conveniently ignored by this group - which
> in psych language constitutes denial. In fact, this practice of ignoring
> persons and/or issues they don't want to confront appears to be a handy
> refuge for members of this group. There appears to be a fear in some of the
> more forceful in this group that, if they loosen their grip, they will be
> left behind. Perhaps they will if they don't grow with it. In any case, this
> is one of the most pressing issues facing the Project today. And one, if not
> confronted, which will cause the Project to fall into mediocrity as newer,
> more tolerant, more innovative projects come into being.

Fully agreed, especially with the last couple of sentences.

... And except the last one. There will be no similar project to
Wikimedia, at least during this century. Projects like Wikipedia are
extremely expensive. Which [rational] projects have or had one million
of direct contributors? Great Wall, Chinese electrical system, Indian
railway system? Maybe. Wikipedia had momentum (and because of that
Jimmy's role is priceless) and it is very hard that we'll see another
project of such dimensions soon.

As we are inside of the project, we are not able to realize the
dimensions of what we are building. The biggest number of articles,
number of words, contributors... -- are just trees in the wood which
we have created. Numbers are just statistical facts which are not
important as is. But, all of them make a wood which existed never
before (and, probably, which won't exist for a long time again).

The point is that we, now and here, are making much bigger decisions
than how to keep ~10TB of data and build another 100TB of [very
useful] data in the next couple of years. Our work affects the whole
human civilization. Would we be able to keep or not our projects as
healthy places, this would give the answer which path would be used by
our civilization.

We have two non-exclusive possibilities: (1) centralized