[WikiEN-l] Google Trends

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 13 Mar 2007, 12:05:24, "Oskar Sigvardsson" 
<oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:

> I really don't think there are any conclusions to draw. "wiki" is
> obviously tied to wikipedia so of course they have risen slightly
> (well, that, and the fact that small wikis are becoming way popular).
> The other three, "open source", "free software" and "linux" are
> completely 100% unrelated to wikipedia. We all make a deep connection
> between wikipedia and those three, but the general public has NO idea
> that we are an off-shoot of the open source movement.

True...  In general, the open source / free software and related 
movements have had a great deal of impact on the world, but mostly in 
a manner that's fairly invisible to the general public.  A huge 
number of Web sites, used by millions of people every day, are 
running on Apache servers under Linux, both of which are open-source, 
but that's just infrastructure which is as invisible to the public as 
the stuff below manholes in the street.  Many of the sites also use 
products of other open-source projects such as Perl, PHP, and MySQL, 
but that's only subtly signaled through file extensions in URLs and 
error messages when something goes wrong.  Growing numbers of people 
use the Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird e-mail client, but do 
they know they're open-source or what that means?  Now Wikipedia has 
become probably the most visible open-source / free project, but 
people still don't understand its philosophical underpinnings.

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