On 5/29/06, Andre Engels
<andreengels(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Well, as said, for Wikipedia wiki worked very
well. That doesn't mean
it works as well for other projects. A wiki means several things at
once, and it is one of them (the wiki philosophy of free editing and
control afterward instead of in advance) that made Wikipedia work
where Nupedia did not. Wiktionary would I think work better in an
environment with the same philosophy but a different technology (more
database-like rather than marked up text). Wikiquote and Commons might
well profit from a similar switch. For Wikisource the whole 'free
editing' concept itself does not seem as suitable, or at least, not as
necessary.
Largely true, however, one should never underestimate the advantages
of even the simple technology we have. We take the ability to edit and
improve the description of an image on Commons for granted, but that
is something you only get from a wiki-like system. Similarly, at least
some degree of consistency within our taxonomy can be maintained
because people can add/remove categories as they please. Compare
Flickr's tags, where keywords are rarely consistent across images of
the same type.
As for Wikisource, I continue to hold that one of its great promises
are free translations of public domain texts, and this is where wiki
becomes quickly indispensable.
... but the *original source* should be protected at the steward level,
which requires a software change.