On 26/06/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
My fundamental question was, is, and will remain: who is actively overseeing the day-to-day growth of this organism with the wisdom, judgment, expertise and, yes, authority, to keep it in check? Without such active oversight, this growth will develop into a jungle - beautiful to observe, but impossible to navigate without a very sharp instrument.
The answer, as far as I can tell, is "we're in utterly uncharted territory here." We're making it up as we go along.
It's like riding a tiger, except it's not a tiger and I'm not really sure what sort of animal it is or anything much about it.
Yes, this is scary ... I find myself somewhat comforted by the fact that Wikipedia is in fact free content, so a fork is possible in the event of the Foundation or the community going completely insane or melting down.
Mind you, forking and then maintaining a database this size is likely to be exceedingly difficult. Citizendium started with forking the whole of en:wp, but quickly decided it really wasn't feasible with the number of volunteers they had, so decided instead to start mostly afresh (keeping the Wikipedia articles they'd already been working on).
I have asked this question many times on this List, but all I keep getting back from some very frequent and usually vocal contributors is either evasion or silence.
I hope the above doesn't count as evasion ...
PS: About a month or so ago, I proposed on this List to change the WP handle from "The encyclopedia anyone can edit" to "Wikipedia: The Living Encyclopedia". The post got absolutely no responses.
Sorry, I meant to reply to it. I like it as a slogan, and it's very descriptive of an important thing about us. The amount of community buy-in that would be needed to effect the change strikes me at first impression as infeasible, but calling it "a living encyclopedia" is a useful way to describe this important difference between wiki-based encyclopedias and how the previous generation (Britannica, Brockhaus et al) did it with the "get a bunch of smart guys to write it" model. Because I seriously think no-one will ever start a general encyclopedia again on that model, and even specialist encyclopedias written on the "bunch of smart guys" or "one smart guy" haven't a hope against the wiki model - wikis, and the MediaWiki software in particular, are a natural for the task of gathering the knowledge of enthusiasts.
- d.