[Wikipedia-l] Proposed fork of Wikipedia

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
When you want to edit in a carefree way on a Wikipedia, just write in
another language then the English one. There are projects where you can
write freely  and as long as it is moderately well written and it conforms
to what people believe to be true, you will be cherished for your efforts.
Please appreciate that it is the English Wikipedia that has grown so much
and it is all these other "249" Wikipedias that hope to suffer from the same
ills because it will mean that they provide a similar service for the people
who read that language...

I wish the Yoruba, Swahili, Igbo, Xhosa, Zulu and even Afrikaans Wikipedia
were suffering from the problems the English Wikipedia is known for.

Thanks,
      GerardM

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 7:32 PM, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:

> 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
>
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