[Foundation-l] We need to make it easy to fork and leave

[David Gerard]

On 12 August 2011 13:37, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod at mccme.ru> wrote:

> My point is that making it easy to fork does not create good competitors.
> Good competitors come from elsewhere. And they will come, if we do not
> deploy WISIWIG, not lower the entrance barrier for novices, not make it
> harder to troll out respectable users, and not find a way to make
> connections to academia or otherwise considerably improve the quality.


Oh, absolutely. The other thing they'd need is an actual sizable
editing community, big enough to take on the task. Citizendium failed
to achieve this, for example, and ended up deleting most of the
articles they'd forked from Wikipedia.

I'm pointing out that the technical ability is also a prerequisite.
Even if you have the other stuff, the ability to do it at all needs to
be present. Technical forkability is explicitly acknowledged by the
tech team as obviously the Right Thing, and it's why WMF is so gung-ho
about open source everything; the trouble is actually putting it into
practice in a resource-restricted environment. It's a variety of
technical debt [*].

WYSIWYG is in progress. Moon shot ahoy!

Academics appear to be coming to us, despite our inability to keep
idiots out of experts' faces. Or out of respectable users' faces. Or
out of anyone's face. A dissolution of the "expert problem" I hadn't
been expecting.


- d.

[*] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt - the shortcuts you
take to get something working, knowing you need to fix them later if
not now. Numerical measure and accounting is tricky, but the analogy
to financial debt is surprisingly useful.