[Foundation-l] They do make or break reputations

Tue Jul 12 21:51:25 UTC 2011

On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 1:08 PM, Thomas Morton
<morton.thomas at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I'll go further-- provided we can do so cheaply, I want new projects
>> that are like the ridiculous early failures of flight.
>> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7OJvv4LG9M].  I want to hear about a
>> new WMF project and it's policy, think "That's crazy-- that's never
>> gonna get off the ground", and indeed, learn something from whether it
>> crashes or whether it actually takes off.

> So, yeh, I agree largely with your theory of "lets throw resources at all
> those mad but clever people out there".

The thing is-- I'm not even sure we need to "throw resources" as much
as we just need to "allow experimentation".  Unless I'm missing
something, actual resources like hosting costs aren't really an issue
for us anymore when it comes to 'small, new projects'.

Technology is growing exponentially-- Processor power and Storage
double every 18 months, Bandwidth behaves similarly.   A file that
cost us $1 to host in 2001 may now cost us less than a penny-- and
this trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future.

I _think_ that means we can have nearly limitless sandboxes, of every
shape and size, but unless they become successful, they should use
hardly any resources at.   This may not be true for projects that want
to work with large binaries, but for mere human generated wikitext,  I
think we passed "infinite" capacity a long time ago.

> But I think we need to learn the
> lesson of Chanute [1] and keep a careful watch for the many hacks,
> egotistical and mad individuals that such an enterprise would encourage.

I don't necessarily expect that the best thing to come out of new
projects would be the new projects.  I expect the best thing to come
out of new projects would be the insights gained from them, and how
our best minds can incorporate new projects' lessons into our existing
ones.  (  Of course, if a new project itself ended up itself being the
best thing, that would be fine also. )

When I say, for example, we'd find something "better than wikipedia"--
 well of course, if WIkipedia agrees it's better in some way, then
Wikipedia will just 'become' the new better thing, making a new a
better Wikipedia.

Alec