[Foundation-l] Re: Information flow

Fri Aug 19 05:58:31 UTC 2005

Ashar Voultoiz wrote:

> There was a discussion in August 2004 about implementing a bounty system
> for MediaWiki development. Anthere ran a survey in july 2004 among
> developers and published results on meta on August 25th 2004:
> 
>   http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Developer_payment_poll/results

A bounty system assumes someone (unpaid? community vote? donator 
decides?) can define the tasks and assign the bounties. One 
question in Anthere's poll was "Which tasks, if any, really ought 
to be done, but currently are not?".  That method of design can 
only result in a bazaar.  To build a cathedral you need an 
architect with somewhat dictatorial powers, and the authority and 
salary for an architect is the least likely outcome of a bounty 
system.  For example, what if there is a $2000 bounty for adding 
complex graphics and another $2000 bounty for improving 
performance?  These bounties are in conflict.  Who is to decide? 
Eric Raymond thinks bazaars are better than cathedrals because of 
this lack of authority, but not everyone agrees with Eric Raymond. 
For example, Linus Torvalds' architectural control over the Linux 
kernel is a good example of dictatorial powers at their best.

Wikipedia has been extremely successful despite (not because) the 
lack of a technical architect, especially in the last two years. 
Some people ask how the Swedish Wikipedia can be the 5th biggest 
with a language spoken by only 9 million people.  One strong 
reason is that the Swedish wiki community enjoyed sub-second 
response times at susning.nu in 2002 and 2003, while Wikipedia's 
utter sluggishness during software phase II and III scared away 
thousands of volunteers.  After susning.nu closed, this community 
has moved over to the Swedish Wikipedia.  Just imagine if 
Wikipedia had performed like that in every language.  And once 
again, I do this only to promote Swedish language among Germans: 
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-July/017624.html

While I appreciate Anthere's outreach, the board should not ask 
the developers which features need to be implemented.  The board 
should promote growth of free contents (e.g. more encyclopedia 
articles, more dictionary definitions, more photos, etc.) and 
investigate why some sectors are growing slower than others.  If 
there are technical bottlenecks, such as slow response times or 
lacking features, the developers should be informed and asked (and 
perhaps paid) to help the situation.  The goal is never technical 
features, but the quicker generation of more contents. This is 
just like any commercial company where the board monitors 
customers and sales, except that the Wikimedia Foundation is not a 
profit-optimizing organization but a free-content-optimizing one.

So don't ask why the Swedish Wikipedia is growing so fast, ask why 
all the others grow so slowly.  We can do better than this.

-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se