On 24/11/2010 09:48, Fred Bauder wrote:
It is not the specific variation which is central.
Anything that
successfully incorporates social media can succeed, as some Wikia wikis
have such as Lostpedia:
http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
Enthusiasm is what makes the difference. Why does FourLoko succeed where
root beer fails?
Well, yes, in that "it's the community, stupid" is a good general
reply
to abstract specification and constitutional talk about online work. Of
course this is the opposite of a "differentiator" from WP; in some sense
a successful community ought to have something in common with (some
successful language version of) Wikipedia. CZ had a founding idea that
the differentiator was at least in part to be "we're not Wikipedia ...
and so experts are welcome". Always partly a slur in fact, but they
apparently have not made that work. Underestimation of gnoming and page
churn is not going to help. Overestimation of the writerly neither.
There is a gap in the market for something that is basically "the mother
of all infoboxes", or a sophisticated version of that. Commercially I
believe this is being done in my home town, probably elsewhere too.
Ontologies and structured data but for the masses, not theoreticians,
and with a thoughtful and attractive front end (for younger viewers,
let's say). Death of the author.
Charles