On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 2:31 AM, Neil Kandalgaonkar neilk@wikimedia.org wrote:
In other words, if you had no legacy, and just wanted to build something from zero, how would you go about creating an innovation that was disruptive to Wikipedia, in fact something that made Wikipedia look like Friendster or Myspace compared to Facebook?
By having content that's consistently better. It doesn't matter how easy your site is to edit. Even if your site is so easy to edit that you get 10% of viewers editing, 10% of your few million (at best) viewers is still going to get you vastly worse content than a small fraction of a percent of Wikipedia's billions. Wikipedia survives off network effects; it's not even remotely a level playing field. People who are focusing on things like WYSIWYG or better-quality editing software are missing the point. You need to have better *content* to attract viewers, before you even stand a chance of edits through your site being meaningful.
If you somehow manage to have content that's consistently better than Wikipedia's, though, people will figure out over time, as long as you can maintain the quality advantage. One obvious strategy would be to mirror Wikipedia in real time and send viewers to Wikipedia proper to edit it, but to have more useful features or a better experience. Maybe a better mobile site, maybe faster page load times, maybe easier navigation or search. Maybe more content, letting people put up vanity bios or articles about obscure webcomics that integrate more or less seamlessly with the Wikipedia corpus. You could even compete by putting up a better editing interface, conceivably, although auth would be tricky to work out. If you ever got a majority of viewers coming to your site, you could fork transparently.
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 6:59 PM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
I think this isn't as useful a question as it might be; defining a project in terms of competing with something else leads to stagnation, not innovation.
I agree. The correct strategy to take down Wikipedia would involve overcoming the network effect that locks it into its current position of dominance, and that's not something that would be useful for Wikipedia itself to do. To fend off attacks of this sort, what you'd want is to make your content harder to reuse, which we explicitly *don't* want to do. Better to ask: how can we enable more people to contribute who want to but can't be bothered?