[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia teamwork

[Bryce Harrington]

On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Aug 2001 sanger1 at nupedia.com wrote:
> > ... but, well--our programmers are very busy 
> > with projects that actually make money.  :-/
> 
> (And the rest of us programmers are not?)
> 
> The reason many people got involved (at the very least, *me*) was the
> willingness to hold the content under the GFDL.

Another point while I'm in rant mode.  ;-)

There is a disincentive to doing coding work for Wikipedia without
having a transparent copy of the site (i.e., a tarball of the whole
thing) to work on, offline.  Similarly, if there is a feeling that the
whole thing belongs to Bromis and that they are unwilling to share the
underlying code, then there will be a similar unwillingness to assist
with enhancing the underlying code.  Just to pull one example out of the
hat - imagine if I wanted to create a German version of wikipedia by
programmatically running the whole site through Babbelfish.  

Furthermore, while none of us have any wish to see Bromis go out of
business, we must admit that these days this is not unheard of.
If Bromis were to go under, and we did not have a backup of the site
that the community could resurrect quickly and easily, then there is a
question whether wikipedia would exist if Bromis did not.  And that is
probably scary to some people when you stop and think about it.

Anyway, my guess is that 99% of the desire for the site backup is for
one or both of the above reasons.  And I should think both of these
reasons are also important to Bromis.  

Bryce