[Foundation-l] Start "questions and answers" site within Wikimedia

[Samuel Klein]

On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 5:34 PM, Oliver Moran <oliver.moran at gmail.com> wrote:

> It is a disappointment in some respects that Stack Overflow uses proprietary software (not least because it is so wonderful) but in all other respects, as a community, they do a great job. I have had wonderful experiences with them and I would urge anyone to get behind them.

I like their spirit and community too.  I would be happy to see a
wikipedia StackExchange site exist.  But it won't contribute to the
global free toolchain for collaborative knowledge that we are part of
-- that will have only limited long-term value.

Proprietary software is often inefficient for developing good and
flexible toolchains, and subject to risks of external control and
monopolistic pricing.  It also tends to be inefficient for users at
scale.  We have a good bit of scale -- we might want a few instances
of whatever Q&A tool we use -- and lots of custom existing help
processes which we'd want to integrate into a Q&A system (aude listed
a few of them).

> Sure, they do things slightly differently — but that doesn't mean they do things wrong.