On 7/5/07, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I would disagree that people on the project like
chaos, or with the
idea that the project is really chaos.
<
WP as a project is... the largest most active focused
online open
community project to date. It's hard to say that we're chaotic, or
attract people who like it that way... we have little to compare it
to.
Both of these statements are spot on.
The whole open wiki reference idea works. It probably
shouldn't, but
we are stumbling towards goodness. It can work better. But it is
working.
And then again, perhaps it should. Many sea-change large-scale
reference works over the past few hundred years (including great early
dictionaries and encyclopedias) have adopted a broadly collaborative
approach -- though shaped and limited by what mechanisms were
available. Likewise the whole open publishing model that lets just
anyone grab paper and typewriter and produce and distribute
manuscripts or even purported math proofs and experimental results...
hasn't been great for the scribners and alchemists, but worked out
well enough for readers and modern writers and scientists.
SJ