On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 12:21 AM, Nikola Smolenski <smole...@eunet.rs> wrote: > On 07/01/2011 09:15 AM, David Gerard wrote: >> Per HaeB's link, this is a perennial proposal. People like the idea, >> but in eighteen years - back as far as the Interpedia proposal, before >> wikis existed - no-one has made one that works. Why not? What's >> failing to go on here? > > Per HaeB's link, IMO no proposal was specific enough, and no proposal > was actually done.
I don't know why it took so long, but here's my guess. It hasn't worked for the past 18 years because prior to wikipedia, nobody ever got anything like this to work. It took a Jimmy to look at patent absurdity of 'anyone can edit' encyclopedias and somehow see that it was working in an amazing and world-changing way. Making just one Wikipedia was crazy enough in 2002-- distributed revision control was only developed years later. We've only had git for 6 years, and for at least the first 2 years, you'd still talk to people who would swear on intuition that git couldn't work on sheer principal. It was pure insanity-- and kinda like wikipedia, it took one of those handy charismatic genius community-builders to believe in such a silly system. I was a skeptic of both wikipedia and git the first time I heard them described (inaccurately). At the end of the day, I think the only reason it hasn't happened yet is really simply that nobody has gotten it together and decided to do it, and it's the sort of thing that no for-profit entity can really do, since it's not easy to profit off of. But also, we're the most natural 'end users' of this tool. To the extent that we dominate the wiki field, other wikis may be looking to us to develop this kind of thing, since we have such greater resources and such greater need. We're the first group in history that really really needs this tool enough to have reason of our own to build it. We're the "Revision Control applied to Documents" people-- it's natural we should be the ones to do it. But honestly, we haven't been ready for that kind of action in the past. Before the fundraising when nuclear, we didn't necessarily have a choice, and we definitely didn't want to mess with our brand before our organizational architecture was stabilized. And we're still not _quite_ ready to launch a major development initiative-- but plans for ramping up innovation and development are in progress, and new innovation is on the horizon. So I think the stars have finally aligned where the organization that needs the tool most could finally actually get it built, if it decides to. -- If the board issued a statement saying it wanted such a "new model" wiki, announcing small symbolic prizes to the participants who show up to build it, and most importantly, if the WMF promised to let people use it once it's built-- I bet it would get built. The proposal's come up over and over and over for 18 years. There's no shortage of excitement about the ideas. Unless there's some secret theoretically flaw I don't know about, I think it would just be a matter of how many geekhours it would take to create it, and whether that's a reasonable use of resources at this stage in our evolution. I've mostly heard 'it's difficult to do' but never 'that software can't be made and here's why". But obviously, this discussion goes back 18 years, so I haven't read all the threads :) Alec _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
