On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 08:26, Nikola Smolenski <smole...@eunet.rs> wrote: > On 15/08/11 08:16, David Richfield wrote: >> It's not just financial collapse. When Sun was acquired by Oracle and >> they started messing about with OpenOffice, it was not hard to fork >> the project - take the codebase and run with it. It's not that easy >> for Wikipedia, and we want to make sure that it remains doable, or >> else the Foundation has too much power over the content community. > > I'm fairly confident it would be much easier to fork Wikipedia than > OpenOffice. >
Technically, it's much easier to fork code than it is to fork wikis especially now in an era of distributed version control systems (Git, hg, bzr) where everyone who checks the code out of a repository has a full copy of the repository. The only technical infrastructure you need is some hosting space for the repo and the other common bits you need for software dev (mailing list, bug tracker etc.) One thing I've been thinking about from the failure of Citizendium is how an expert community could set up their own external version of pending changes: basically a simple database of stable versions, so any individual or group could set up a server with stable versions of articles, then you could subscribe to a set of stable version sets - so, say, the International Astronomical Union mark a bunch of revisions of astronomy articles as stable, and if you've got the browser plugin installed with their dataset installed, when you visit one of those pages, it'd show you the stable version they chose. And the flipside is that if you are (in my humble opinion) a cold fusion nut or a homeopathy nut, you could find some crazy person who believes in those things to come up with his or her own set of crank stable versions. And the stable version could be marked as checked by a particular person from a particular institution with their real name if that is the practice in that community: perhaps in physics or philosophy or psychology or some other academic subject, having a real name person sign off on a particular stable version is fine and dandy, but in, say, the Pokémon fan community, they don't really have the same assumptions. (Again, one of the failures of Citizendium: you don't need a guy with a Ph.D to approve the articles on Pokémon in the way you might want a credentialed expert to sign off on, say, an article on cancer treatment.) The essential thing is to separate out the things that people want: some people want "distributed Wikipedia", but why? Well, one good reason seems to be so you can have stable versions with expert oversight (like Citizendium) - well you can get most of the desiderata that led to Citizendium by having a third-party distributed approval layer and browser plugins etc. A little bit of hacking provides a lot of opportunity for different communities to take Wikipedia and run with it in the ways they want to. This kind of proposal would provide a lot of what Citizendium was shooting for but without the coordination problem of trying to get disparate communities of people to work together in a way the CZ community kind of failed to do. Consider for instance the ethnic studies/women's studies people who didn't find Citizendium a welcoming environment.[1] Under this kind of proposal, if there is a community of people involved in ethnic studies who want to participate in Citizendium-style expert approval, they can set up some very lightweight software and organise their approvals in whatever way fits best with their academic community norms. Essentially, in software terms, this would be like a 'packager', someone who takes Wikipedia's output on a certain topic and marks specific revisions or whatever as good or bad. They'd still be welcome (and indeed encouraged) to participate in editing on Wikipedia in the traditional way, and ideally the community wouldn't take participation in such an enterprise against them as an editor (just as they currently don't or shouldn't take participating in Wikinfo or Citizendium or even Conservapedia against someone), and any comments that come up in the 'packaging' process could be taken as feedback in the normal way just as if packager at Debian finds a bug with a piece of software, he or she can point that out the upstream maintainer. Feedback? [1] see http://cryptome.info/citizendium.htm and http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Citizendium -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/> _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
