[WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[George Herbert]

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 1:47 PM, FT2 <ft2.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Pride matters, arrogance is harmful. What we have achieved is to demonstrate
> that legitimate, free, open, collaborative knowledge is to be taken
> seriously, and some knowhow about its creation and maintenance. That's not a
> reason for arrogance and does not mean we are "best" or have some kind of
> guarantee for future.
>
> Commercially, enterprises often flourish in an ecosystem of similar
> enterprises or related needs. Those lacking competitors and alternatives
> tend over years and decades to become lazy, inefficient, and complacent.
> Those with others around have the "best the rest of the world can devise" to
> measure up to, compare with, and provoke improvement.
>
> Like others have said, we need others around. Maybe not today or tomorrow,
> but for the future.


There are two schools of thought here -

One, that competition is always great and effective.

Two, that sometimes a natural monopoly develops of some sort, and that
for the time that the paradigm remains valid there's really only one
player of note.

The Internet sees examples of both types of activity.

Google has search competitors, by dint of Yahoo not having gone
bankrupt quite yet and Microsoft having thrown Bing in as the default
search engine for the OS of choice for 90% plus of the computers sold
today (plus a lot of phones).  A lot of people want it to be in
Category One, but it seems to be at least marginally a Category Two
case.

Craigslist killed a whole paradigm (classified ads in print
newspapers) and has not evolved any useful competition.  Ebay took the
rest of that market, and invented a new market, and has not had any
credible competitor.  Both are Category Two.

Amazon invented its field, but has active competition (Borders, B&N at
least).  Clearly Category One.

The Internet Archive has no (public) competition.  Nobody's even interested.

The social network website arena has had intense competition, which is
settling down into a Category Two monopoly around Facebook.  Twitter
fused SMS with broadcast and has not evolved any competition; Category
Two again.

Skype is only one of many internet phone services now.


For nonprofit / public service organizations, there's an ulterior
motive in any case.  Two, actually...  The exterior ulterior motive is
helping other people, and the not-so-secret personal or interior
ulterior motive, that people enjoy being seen as contributors and
participants, it's an ego boost.

Neither of those ulterior motives is like the motives for a business,
which are primarily to make money (preserve and gain market share and
margins).

We have analogs to "market share" and "margins" but they're not the same.

Because they're not the same, some of the inertial resistance to
change is different and operates in different mechanisms.  Wikipedia
remakes itself regularly, though there are longterm participants,
rules, and goals.  We change the software, editing standards, our IP
license, community membership and active editors set, community
participation and rules.  We actively and moderately skeptically
review all the policy and core values in the community.

Because of that, I think we're more effective at responding to
pressure to change than a typical business.  In some ways we aren't -
we lack "leadership" in many senses of the word, though we have
leaders who people listen to and who focus discussion and debate.  But
we aren't institutionally opposed to changing things to make them
better.  We don't need an external competitor to tell us that we have
problems, to the degree businesses often do.

I won't pretend that we're really good at it; the community is
analagous to herding cats in many ways, and people are resistant to
change at times and in some ways.  But I think we're better enough, in
some key ways.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com