[Wikipedia-l] Proposed fork of Wikipedia

[Lars Aronsson]

Thomas Larsen wrote:

> Wikipedia's rules are _way_ too complicated:

This wasn't the case seven years ago, when Wikipedia was new.  
But since then, two things have happened: Wikipedia has gotten 
seven years older, and Wikipedia has attracted thousands of 
people.  The number of man-months spent working and thinking on 
the project has resulted in significant complexity.

We should ask ourselves if the old sentence (Wikipedia, the free 
encyclopedia) "that anyone can edit" really holds true any more.  
I think it's about as true as "anyone can learn to play the 
piano".  Despite this democratic aspect of music, we still have 
professional musicians.  To be a skilled and successful 
contributor to Wikipedia today requires significant training and 
practice.  If some people can join in without preparation, it's 
because their background (as programmers, or similar) has prepared 
them.  That's not "anyone".

If you start a project on the basis that Wikipedia is too 
complicated, you are likely to fool yourself.  Your project will 
be different only as long as (1) it is far younger than Wikipedia 
and/or (2) it has attracted far fewer people than Wikipedia.  For 
a successful project, you want neither of these.

You need a way to keep a project simple *despite* attracting lots 
of users and accumulating over time.  Maybe you have that formula, 
only time can tell. The wonder of Wikipedia is that it isn't far 
more complicated than it is.  Ask some people who work on 
industrial development projects involving the same amount of 
people and time, and you'll find many examples that have been 
faster in accumulating complexity ([[Cruft]], feature creep).

> People say, "Abide by the spirit of the policies, not the 
> letter," but in this case why not make policies simple?

You're welcome to hack away at this.  Did you try to?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se