[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is forever.

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 7/19/06, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> >Wiki does a lot in facilitating our activity, but
> >to suggest that Britannica would have had an increased lifetime merely
> >by adopting Wiki technology is somewhat laughable.
>
> I was making the assumption (an assumption which I maintain isn't
> invalid) that having put the Wiki infrastructure in place, and having
> done a little advertising, the project would have been successful. I
> don't think Wikipedia was successful because it grew from the FLOSS
> community. It was successful because anyone could edit it (you could
> argue that this was entirely because Wikipeida grew out of the FLOSS
> community). Britannica could have been just as successful if they had
> allowed anyone to edit.

The number of unsucessful and amazingly unsuccessful wiki's implies
that there is secret sauce involved, and that the secret sauce isn't
the mere use of Wiki technology.

It is by no means a given that britannica could have been successful
simply by letting anyone edit as there have been failures among sites
which have done exactly that.


> > Because of the poor resource availability to cost ratio our project is
> > sorely lacking alternative solutions on the development side. This
> > results in an inability to produce a 'survival of the fittest'
> > environment for software features. I am concerned that this is a
> > significant risk.
>
> We do, in fact, have quite a powerful development environment. The
> "open-sourceness"of our software allows for interesting twists and
> turns in MediaWiki. Others can develop MediaWiki in a ways that we
> don't have time and resources for. As an example of this, just take a
> look at the development of Semantic MediaWiki on Sourceforge. This
> development takes nothing from Wikimedia resources but potentially
> benefits us on a grand scale. This is facilitated by our commitment to
> free software - the ability of others to reuse our work and create
> better things with it
>
> I think we *do* have a "survival of the fittest" development method.
> Apart from the aforementioned "open-sourceness" of our software,
> members of the community (who aren't developers) spend their own time
> developing certain features and additions in the form of bots and
> tools on toolserver. These features are then put through rigorous
> practical tests (bots function on Wikipedia, proving their worth and
> exposing their mistakes). If one of these features proves to be
> wonderfully useful, it is assimilated into MediaWiki proper.

It doesn't change that fact that there are additions which can't be
simply done outside of mediawiki core (due to schema change
requirements, and needing hooks in places we don't provide them).

There is no 1:1 competition for "Semantic MediaWiki" that I'm aware
of...   In general users are left to take or leave software features.
I'm not whining about it, because I don't see how we can avoid it...
we're already doing a great job being modular.   It's just something
that we should be aware of...   What we have works, in part because
Brion is a great gatekeeper, but it's not a competative model and I'm
very glad we haven't enabled most of the extensions out there... a
fair number of them are pretty terrible.  (They scratched the authors
itch, but thats as far as many go).