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

[Wjhonson]

Feedback: Approval based systems only work on a tiny subset of articles as they disenfranchise the vast majority of contributors who don't have a multi-tiered content approach at all.





-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Morris <tom at tommorris.org>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Mon, Aug 15, 2011 2:04 am
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] We need to make it easy to fork and leave


On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 08:26, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.rs> wrote:
 On 15/08/11 08:16, David Richfield wrote:
> It's not just financial collapse.  When Sun was acquired by Oracle and
> they started messing about with OpenOffice, it was not hard to fork
> the project - take the codebase and run with it.  It's not that easy
> for Wikipedia, and we want to make sure that it remains doable, or
> else the Foundation has too much power over the content community.

 I'm fairly confident it would be much easier to fork Wikipedia than
 OpenOffice.

Technically, it's much easier to fork code than it is to fork wikis
specially now in an era of distributed version control systems (Git,
g, bzr) where everyone who checks the code out of a repository has a
ull copy of the repository. The only technical infrastructure you
eed is some hosting space for the repo and the other common bits you
eed for software dev (mailing list, bug tracker etc.)
One thing I've been thinking about from the failure of Citizendium is
ow an expert community could set up their own external version of
ending changes: basically a simple database of stable versions, so
ny individual or group could set up a server with stable versions of
rticles, then you could subscribe to a set of stable version sets -
o, say, the International Astronomical Union mark a bunch of
evisions of astronomy articles as stable, and if you've got the
rowser plugin installed with their dataset installed, when you visit
ne of those pages, it'd show you the stable version they chose. And
he flipside is that if you are (in my humble opinion) a cold fusion
ut or a homeopathy nut, you could find some crazy person who believes
n those things to come up with his or her own set of crank stable
ersions.
And the stable version could be marked as checked by a particular
erson from a particular institution with their real name if that is
he practice in that community: perhaps in physics or philosophy or
sychology or some other academic subject, having a real name person
ign off on a particular stable version is fine and dandy, but in,
ay, the Pokémon fan community, they don't really have the same
ssumptions. (Again, one of the failures of Citizendium: you don't
eed a guy with a Ph.D to approve the articles on Pokémon in the way
ou might want a credentialed expert to sign off on, say, an article
n cancer treatment.)
The essential thing is to separate out the things that people want:
ome people want "distributed Wikipedia", but why? Well, one good
eason seems to be so you can have stable versions with expert
versight (like Citizendium) - well you can get most of the desiderata
hat led to Citizendium by having a third-party distributed approval
ayer and browser plugins etc. A little bit of hacking provides a lot
f opportunity for different communities to take Wikipedia and run
ith it in the ways they want to. This kind of proposal would provide
 lot of what Citizendium was shooting for but without the
oordination problem of trying to get disparate communities of people
o work together in a way the CZ community kind of failed to do.
onsider for instance the ethnic studies/women's studies people who
idn't find Citizendium a welcoming environment.[1] Under this kind of
roposal, if there is a community of people involved in ethnic studies
ho want to participate in Citizendium-style expert approval, they can
et up some very lightweight software and organise their approvals in
hatever way fits best with their academic community norms.
Essentially, in software terms, this would be like a 'packager',
omeone who takes Wikipedia's output on a certain topic and marks
pecific revisions or whatever as good or bad. They'd still be welcome
and indeed encouraged) to participate in editing on Wikipedia in the
raditional way, and ideally the community wouldn't take participation
n such an enterprise against them as an editor (just as they
urrently don't or shouldn't take participating in Wikinfo or
itizendium or even Conservapedia against someone), and any comments
hat come up in the 'packaging' process could be taken as feedback in
he normal way just as if packager at Debian finds a bug with a piece
f software, he or she can point that out the upstream maintainer.
Feedback?
[1] see http://cryptome.info/citizendium.htm and
ttp://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Citizendium
-- 
om Morris
http://tommorris.org/>
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