[Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

[Andrew Gray]

On 5 September 2011 17:00, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, but most mirrors are just that - mirrors. As far as I know, there is no
> Wikipedia mirror that actually contains extra functionality - like improved
> searching, wisiwyg editing, automatic translation, image filtering, or
> whatever else one could think of.

There have been a couple of attempts to make more-or-less curated
mirrors, but they've found it hard to gain traction. It's a bit of a
vicious cycle - to get readers you need lots of content, to get the
resources to curate lots of content you need readers (this holds
whether you rely on volunteers or whether you run it commercially). To
have a chance of getting enough readers to make the project a viable
going concern, you'd need to invest a lot of resources up front,
banking on the assumption that:
* a) your difference from the status quo is enough to attract some
fraction of users;
* b) the search engines would actually work in your favour rather than
treating you as Wikipedia-With-Adwords Dump #41,875; and
* c) it wouldn't be cloned fifty-three times by next week.

This holds regardless of what it is - whether it's stable-versioning
or image-filtering, any prospective reuser is gambling on an uncertain
level of takeup and a massive unknown in terms of search-engine
response. If you have a target audience who you know want your
specific flavour of curation, you can bypass this and go straight to
them - see, for example, the Wikipedia For Schools offline projects -
but it's not clear how you could then use this to bootstrap a
successful internet service, since projects like this are usually
selections rather than whole-content curation. Some kind of
partnership with a portal might work, but I don't know if anyone's
tried it yet.

In short, the current model for online mirrors serves to discourage
people from putting much effort into them, and so all sorts of
potentially desirable (or potentially interesting, or even potentially
amazingly-bad-example) experiments with reusing our content just
aren't happening.

It's not a problem we can solve (and it's perhaps not one we should be
trying to solve) but it does mean we shouldn't draw any firm
conclusions from the absence of any specific types of project -
there's an absence of *all* sorts of projects, good and bad ones
alike.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk