[Wikimedia-l] Stack Exchange vs. Wikimedia

[Matthew Flaschen]

On 09/23/2013 12:20 PM, Jan Kučera wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> is anyone out here participating in any of the Stack Exchange projects?

Yes, I've participated significantly in both Wikimedia projects and 
Stack Overflow.

> Do people here still really think voting is a bad thing and wiki is the
> easiest way to collaborate?

It depends how the community is intended to work.  Wikipedia is about a 
community seeking to craft encyclopedia articles that are verifiable and 
NPOV.  A well-written (and compliant with the policies) article isn't 
necessarily popular with readers, and vice versa (Justin Bieber would 
probably get a huge number of votes even if it weren't written very 
well), and doesn't necessary fit any one editor's POV.

Stack Overflow is about individual experts sharing solutions to specific 
problems.  Individual posts are wikis, but the unspoken rule is to use 
this in a limited fashion.  Typically, people are expected to make minor 
fixes while still maintaining the original poster's voice.

> I have repeatedly had proposals for employing some voting mechanism at
> least on the back-stage, but no one was listening to me...

This email isn't clear about how you actually propose to use voting.

A good thing about the Stack Exchange sites is that they all use the 
exact same license as Wikipedia (and some of the other Wikimedia sites), 
which is CC-BY-SA 3.0.  We could probably take advantage of that a 
little more to migrate reference-like content (while still being 
cautious about only importing appropriate stuff).

Matt Flaschen