[WikiEN-l] "Wikipedia Empire Based on Open Source Worst Practices?"

[David Gerard]

Can anyone extract useful ideas from this blog entry:

http://thomas-lord.blogspot.com/2006/08/wikipedia-empire-based-on-open-source.html

There is the usual suggestion that if Wikipedia adopts article forks
then all will be well because then the obnoxious editors who don't
want to work with others will be appeased and something about power
structures. Etc etc.

But there are some vague notions of *lots* of alternate Wikipedia
distributions (rather than "forks"), analogous to Linux distributions.
This bit seems like an interesting idea, but I'm not quite sure how
one would approach it. Categories as packages? (like an .rpm or a .deb
.) Is there something here that's the seed of a useful idea?


- d.