Neil Kandalgaonkar (2010-12-29 21:40):
On 12/29/10 4:05 AM, Bryan Tong Minh wrote:
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Maciej
Jaros<egil(a)wp.pl> wrote:
If one would have a budget of gazillions of
dollars then it would be
quite easy ;-). The problem is - what would be the point of investing
such money if you wouldn't get it back from this investment?
While money can fix a lot of things, I don't think the current
bottleneck is money.
I apologize for sending this discussion in a direction I
hadn't
intended. The money was purely to imply that you had to be motivated,
not that you had a vast budget.
Let me be more explicit. The "innovator's dilemma" problem, already
referred to in this discussion, occurs because the successful innovator
can't see past the goal of defending their earlier successes, and
working with their existing assets.
The thought experiment of working for a competitor was meant to suggest
this: what would you do if you wanted to make Wikipedia's earlier
successes *obsolete*? The point is to then try to look at some of our
greatest assets and see if, in the current environment, they could be
potential liabilities.
My original point was that the community is the power of WMF sites and
that this alone is IMHO hard to beat. To be more exact this is a
community that I believe is loyal and needs to trust the
corporation/founder/foundation behind the site (I've seen a community
driven project fall after loosing this trust).
And the followup question was "if a competitor
can do this, why don't WE
do this?"
We don't because it would probably be more reasonable for our competitor
to do something completely different to gather different community or he
would have to make a gigantic effort to steal current community (both in
technical and PR terms). I think the effort would simply be inefficient.
In any case - the next killer functionality (if that's what you're
asking) is well known and already mentioned - WYSIWYG. WYSIWYG that
makes edits easy for new users and make them not break existing markup.
And yes I believe present markup needs to be preserved. Not because it's
good, it's because it is well know to many current users. It's because
community is accustomed with it. Loosing users after changing markup
drastically would certainly not be a good idea. You have to remember how
many disappointment brought a simple change of default skin. Something
that can be changed back in 3 clicks. And so new markup (if such would
be used) would have to at least be parseable back to wikitext.
Regards,
Nux.