Feedback: Approval based systems only work on a tiny subset of articles as they disenfranchise the vast majority of contributors who don't have a multi-tiered content approach at all.
-----Original Message----- From: Tom Morris <t...@tommorris.org> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Mon, Aug 15, 2011 2:04 am Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] We need to make it easy to fork and leave 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 specially now in an era of distributed version control systems (Git, g, bzr) where everyone who checks the code out of a repository has a ull copy of the repository. The only technical infrastructure you eed is some hosting space for the repo and the other common bits you eed for software dev (mailing list, bug tracker etc.) One thing I've been thinking about from the failure of Citizendium is ow an expert community could set up their own external version of ending changes: basically a simple database of stable versions, so ny individual or group could set up a server with stable versions of rticles, then you could subscribe to a set of stable version sets - o, say, the International Astronomical Union mark a bunch of evisions of astronomy articles as stable, and if you've got the rowser plugin installed with their dataset installed, when you visit ne of those pages, it'd show you the stable version they chose. And he flipside is that if you are (in my humble opinion) a cold fusion ut or a homeopathy nut, you could find some crazy person who believes n those things to come up with his or her own set of crank stable ersions. And the stable version could be marked as checked by a particular erson from a particular institution with their real name if that is he practice in that community: perhaps in physics or philosophy or sychology or some other academic subject, having a real name person ign off on a particular stable version is fine and dandy, but in, ay, the Pokémon fan community, they don't really have the same ssumptions. (Again, one of the failures of Citizendium: you don't eed a guy with a Ph.D to approve the articles on Pokémon in the way ou might want a credentialed expert to sign off on, say, an article n cancer treatment.) The essential thing is to separate out the things that people want: ome people want "distributed Wikipedia", but why? Well, one good eason seems to be so you can have stable versions with expert versight (like Citizendium) - well you can get most of the desiderata hat led to Citizendium by having a third-party distributed approval ayer and browser plugins etc. A little bit of hacking provides a lot f opportunity for different communities to take Wikipedia and run ith it in the ways they want to. This kind of proposal would provide lot of what Citizendium was shooting for but without the oordination problem of trying to get disparate communities of people o work together in a way the CZ community kind of failed to do. onsider for instance the ethnic studies/women's studies people who idn't find Citizendium a welcoming environment.[1] Under this kind of roposal, if there is a community of people involved in ethnic studies ho want to participate in Citizendium-style expert approval, they can et up some very lightweight software and organise their approvals in hatever way fits best with their academic community norms. Essentially, in software terms, this would be like a 'packager', omeone who takes Wikipedia's output on a certain topic and marks pecific revisions or whatever as good or bad. They'd still be welcome and indeed encouraged) to participate in editing on Wikipedia in the raditional way, and ideally the community wouldn't take participation n such an enterprise against them as an editor (just as they urrently don't or shouldn't take participating in Wikinfo or itizendium or even Conservapedia against someone), and any comments hat come up in the 'packaging' process could be taken as feedback in he normal way just as if packager at Debian finds a bug with a piece f software, he or she can point that out the upstream maintainer. Feedback? [1] see http://cryptome.info/citizendium.htm and ttp://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Citizendium -- om Morris http://tommorris.org/> _______________________________________________ oundation-l mailing list oundatio...@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
