[Wikipedia-l] Proposed fork of Wikipedia

[David Gerard]

2008/7/14 Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se>:

> 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).


Yes. Wikipedia's problems are largely emergent features of an
experiment, rather than a matter of negligent design of an engineered
product.

See also http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Instruction_creep and
understand why it's so.


- d.