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

[Milos Rancic]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 7:34 PM, Milos Rancic<millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>

Hm. Mail hasn't been finished. I wanted to save it and consider
finishing it later (probably, I wouldn't send it). So, probably, you
should forget for this email :)