Marc Riddell wrote:
Zoney wrote:
On 08/05/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
We're not professional. Except for a tiny bunch of people who work for the Foundation, we're all volunteers and our time is not especially coordinated. Wikipedia is what it is, and part of that is that we've grown faster than our organization has.
The project should be managed professionally if it is indeed a serious project.
on 5/9/07 12:22 AM, Ray Saintonge at saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Absolutely not!!!
Why not, Ray?
The project has had over the last six years proven success despite being run almost exclusively by amateurs. It's contents have stood up well in comparisons with what competitive products there are, and where errors and inaccuracies have been noted it has had a remarkable ability for self-correction. The ludicrously low amount of money spent to maintain the site certainly ensures that it is the most cost-effective site in the world's top ten. While there have been noteworthy gaffes and outrageous entries, these nevertheless represent a miniscule proportion of articles. A certain amount of this must be expected; it cannot be eliminated completely.
The power of the project is not in the product, but in the process. In what has become McLuhan's cliché, "The medium is the message." The medium is hotter than any that McLuhan might ever have imagined. The fact that a broad public can and does now participate in building such a site as this, or any other of the big websites, is evidence of a tremendous paradigm shift in the world of communications. As Kuhn forsaw, a paradigm shift does damage to the old ways, especially to those who would cling to those old ways. People now participate because they can; they work on shaping their future because they can. The effect on the record and movie industries may be viewed by some as sad, but for others it represents new freedom and new self-esteem.
Otherwise it's all just a bit of a larf and it'll eventually come crashing down.
Had we been so professional from the beginning we would never have risen high enough to be able to come crashing down.
Perhaps we need to begin with a definition of "professional", but, in any case, what is your reasoning here?
In it's crudest manifestation a professional is one who is paid to do a job. It is also a person who has "paid his dues" to the established order, and now has the credentials that permit him to repeat past mistakes. Had we been run by professionals from the beginning we might have had the same success as Nupedia. That project was as professional as we are not. It captivated no imaginations. Before we can crash down we need to have overcome the fear of flying that made us airborne in the first place.
Ec