[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is forever.

[Ray Saintonge]

Oldak Quill 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). 
>
Absolutely. 

>Britannica could have been just as successful if they had
>allowed anyone to edit.
>
I doubt it.  Asking it to do that would be like asking its editors to 
throw themseves from a cliff in the expectation that angels would guide 
them safely to the ground.  Their most important editions were premised 
on the authority of established and famous experts and top scholars of 
the day.  That would have been too much to give up.

>>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.
>
FLOSS is about software.  Your comments focus on software, and even 
though the "medium is the message", you seem to forget that a 
significant proportion of us deal purely and simply with content.  For 
the general reader software is only a small part of what Wikipedia is about.

Ec