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

[David Gerard]

On 1 July 2011 09:27, Alec Conroy <alecmconroy at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.


The fact that Github's git-backed wikis haven't been seized upon
suggests to me that there's no demand for a distributed wiki system
amongst the *readers*.

It's like the perennial proposal for multiple article versions on
Wikipedia for each point of view. This solves a problem for the
*writers*, but makes one for the *readers*. They seem to want one
source with one article on a topic, else they'd just hit the top ten
links in Google instead of going to Wikipedia. (Wikinfo has tried
implementing this. Its readership is negligible compared to Wikipedia,
but its writers enjoy it.)

Why do people want ten Wikipedias to look up instead of one? They
observably don't - they want a source they can quickly look up
something in that they can reasonably trust to be useful. They only go
to multiple sources if that one starts sucking.

A distributed wiki proposal needs to clearly solve a problem the readers have.

There are several such perennial proposals that are ignored because
they are actually about solving problems for the writers, and not
solving problems for the readers.


- d.