[Foundation-l] Wikipedia, the Pedia that used to be a Wiki

[Teofilo]

The other day, I read the [[:en:Wikileaks]] article on Wikipedia. What
it said was, more or less, that Wilileaks is a leaks website that used
to be a wiki. And I wondered : how long will it take before we read
somewhere : Wikipedia, the Pedia that used to be a Wiki ?

Sooner than you might think.

Just yesterday, someone reported a mistake at the French village pump
: a castle was located at the wrong location on the new
toolserver.org/~kolossos/openlayers map tool. That castle, called
"Pierrefonds Castle", should be located in the Pierrefonds town, not
in Senlis town, like the Windsor castle is located in the town of
Windsor to the exclusion of any other English town.

I thought this was the time to show the power of a wiki : a cool
website everybody can edit, especially useful to instantly correct
straightforward mistakes like that one.

The toolserver.org/~kolossos/openlayers software is cute enough to
provide "source: ru" at the bottom of the little popup window that
pops up when you click on the wrongly located castle. I instantly
corrected the wrong coordinates on the Russian language version of
Wikipedia (1) which had the mistake.

We are more or less 24 hours (19 hours, exactly) after I corrected the
mistake, but the toolserver.org/~kolossos/openlayers is still wrong.
This is not what a wiki is supposed to be.

There are 2 potential reasons. A) The Russian Wikipedia uses "Flagged
revisions" and my newbie edit might be ignored by whoever wants to
ignore it because it is flagged as a non-flagged newbie edit.B) the
toolserver.org/~kolossos/openlayers software might be too slow to
perform updates.

Whatever the reason, this is evidence that Wikipedia is changing into
something that is not a wiki.

I am wondering if the whole problem is not the sheer idea of having
"developers" doing their job : "developping". Developping means
changing. If you change a wiki, you have 99% of chances that what it
changes into is not a wiki.

This was my first anti-developer rant of 2011. Happy new year everybody.

(1) http://ru.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%D0%9F%D1%8C%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%84%D0%BE%D0%BD_%28%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BA%29&action=historysubmit&diff=30694643&oldid=28135989