[WikiEN-l] Wikis for News (was: Cooperation with Euobserver)

Tue Sep 30 23:56:02 UTC 2003

Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:

>--- Andrew Lih <alih at hku.hk> wrote:
>
>>Time limits don't serve Wikis well.  Wikis are good
>>for continually
>>evolving content. An arbitrarily set deadline would
>>drastically change
>>the nature of edit wars, neutrality disputes,
>>community and evolution.
>>
>>I would equate it to an eBay auction where bidders
>>having an infinite
>>amount of money, because we all have an inifinite
>>amount of opinions. :)
>>
>>-Fuzheado
>>
>
>Well, an encyclopedia typically has the goal of a
>static end product too, don't they? And they need to
>meet some sort of deadline.
>
There is no need for an encyclopedia to be static; we are not paper. 
 One of our advantages is our ablity to change our text as events 
happen.  A printed or CD version will be static because it can't do 
that.  Still it may be the only way to disseminate that knowledge to 
some parts of the world's population.

eBay has deadlines because sooner or later a decision has to be made 
about the sale of a product.  If everyone had an infinite amount of 
money it wouldn't work on eBay.  Infinite bid would be meaningless since 
they do nothing to determine the price.  If two bidders made an infinite 
bid, one could easily award the lot to the first one to make that bid, 
but at what price?  With arbitrarily high (but finite) bids, you would 
have a rapidly inflated market since everybody could bid.

Ec

>