[Wikimedia-l] Progress...

[David Gerard]

On 26 July 2013 13:33, Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:

>> "As with other inventions that produced an inferior product at a much
>> lower price, from the printing press to the steam-driven loom to
>> Wikipedia, what happens now is largely in the hands of the people
>> experimenting with the new tools, rather than defending themselves from
>> them."
>> http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/07/08/moocs-and-economic-reality/

> Those bloody kids and their newfangled inventions like the steam loom and
> the printing press just don't have any respect any more.
> I seriously have no idea what that paragraph is trying to say.


It's a bad restatement of "worse is better"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better - the mechanism for
disruptive innovation. Wherever quality comes up against convenience,
convenience wins most of the time.

As Gerard notes, Wikipedia is *now* better as well as more convenient,
but it didn't start that way.


- d.