[Foundation-l] No tail-lights. What do we do now? (was Call for referendum)

[Alec Conroy]

On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 12:21 AM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.rs> wrote:
> On 07/01/2011 09:15 AM, David Gerard wrote:
>> Per HaeB's link, this is a perennial proposal. People like the idea,
>> but in eighteen years - back as far as the Interpedia proposal, before
>> wikis existed - no-one has made one that works. Why not? What's
>> failing to go on here?
>
> Per HaeB's link, IMO no proposal was specific enough, and no proposal
> was actually done.


I don't know why it took so long, but here's my guess.   It hasn't
worked for the past 18 years because prior to wikipedia, nobody ever
got anything like this to work.   It took a Jimmy to look at patent
absurdity of 'anyone can edit' encyclopedias and somehow see that it
was working in an amazing and world-changing way.

Making just one Wikipedia was crazy enough in 2002-- distributed
revision control was only developed years later.

We've only had git  for 6 years, and for at least the first 2 years,
you'd still talk to people who would swear on intuition that git
couldn't work on sheer principal.   It was pure insanity--   and kinda
like wikipedia, it took one of those handy charismatic genius
community-builders to believe in such a silly system.     I was a
skeptic of both wikipedia and git the first time I heard them
described (inaccurately).

At the end of the day, I think the only reason it hasn't happened yet
is really simply that nobody has gotten it together and decided to do
it, and it's the sort of thing that no for-profit entity can really
do, since it's not easy to profit off of.    But also, we're the most
natural 'end users' of this tool.   To the extent that we dominate the
wiki field, other wikis may be looking to us to develop this kind of
thing,  since we have such greater resources and such greater need.
We're the first group in history that really really needs this tool
enough to have reason of our own to build it.  We're the "Revision
Control applied to Documents" people-- it's natural we should be the
ones to do it.

But honestly, we haven't been ready for that kind of action in the
past.  Before the fundraising when nuclear, we didn't necessarily have
a choice, and we definitely didn't want to mess with our brand before
our organizational architecture was stabilized.       And we're still
not _quite_ ready to launch a major development initiative-- but plans
for ramping up innovation and development are in progress, and new
innovation is on the horizon.    So I think the stars have finally
aligned where the organization that needs the tool most could finally
actually get it built, if it decides to.

--
If the board issued a statement  saying it wanted such a "new model"
wiki, announcing small symbolic prizes  to the participants who show
up to build it, and most importantly, if the WMF promised  to let
people use it once it's built--   I bet it would get built.   The
proposal's come up over and over and over for 18 years.   There's no
shortage of excitement about the ideas.

Unless there's some secret theoretically flaw I don't know about, I
think it would just be a matter of how many geekhours it would take to
create it, and whether that's a reasonable use of resources at this
stage in our evolution.   I've mostly heard 'it's difficult to do' but
never 'that software can't be made and here's why".      But
obviously, this discussion goes back 18 years, so I haven't read all
the threads :)

Alec