Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 7/18/06, Oldak Quill <oldakquill(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I think it is more to do with Wikipedia's
ability to adapt and change
with developing technology. If Encyclopedia Britannica had created a
wiki back in 2000, Wikipedia may not exist and Britannica would have
extended their lifetime by a few decades.
"It's not the technology. It's the social structure, stupid".
Although Wikipedia is about building an encyclopedia and not about a
building a community, without our social structure our project could
not be a success. Wiki does a lot in facilitating our activity, but
to suggest that Britannica would have had an increased lifetime merely
by adopting Wiki technology is somewhat laughable.
It's also the ability to live with paradox. In its short life Wikipedia
has aged dramatically. It has already made many fundamental decisions
that limit its future options.
Take verifiability as an example. This concept is a direct response to
repeated complaints from the outside world that Wikipedia is not a
reliable source of information. From a strictly objective perspective
verifiability is a good thing, but it still has a cost. It leads to a
situation where the game is taken ove by rules lawyers who can convince
the other players that order is good. This makes it very difficult for
the Calvinball player to introduce a new rule into the existing game.
Instead, his new rule involves starting a new game. The 18th century
Calvinball players that set up Britannica established the seeds of their
own destruction when they failed to account for the internet; that they
were unaware of the internet at the time is irrelevant.
[snip]
As long as we are willing to embrace changes and
developments (such
as, at the moment, Wiktionary Z and Semantic MediaWiki) and don't
object for reasons of familiarity, we should do fine.
To add some contrast:
Just because you die out without some changes, does not mean all
changes should be accepted. In biology we find that most mutations
are harmful.
No, I would venture to say that most mutations are inconsequential.
Because of the poor resource availability to cost ratio
our project is
sorely lacking alternative solutions on the development side. This
results in an inability to produce a 'survival of the fittest'
environment for software features. I am concerned that this is a
significant risk.
Quite the contrary. If you can't come up with the resources you are not
the fittest.
I can't suggest a real solution to this today, but
I think that one of
the things we already to today helps the situation somewhat: do as
much as possible without modifying Mediawiki. And with bots,
toolserver, templates, manual, and quasi-manual processes... we're
already doing that.
Which only proves my point that most biological mutations are
inconsequential. Your examples reflect only mere tinkering with the
accepted technology of the game.
I'm wary of software which grants someone who
merely has working code
the ability to control long term direction of the project. Enwiki
folks are very concerned about the consolidation of 'power' that comes
from combining a bcrat and a arbcom member in one usrs.... Good thing
that developers are under the radar, because with the ability to make
wide scale decisions without consensus that comes from a patch is
pretty much unparalleled. But I suppose thats why we don't have any
developers on the Wikimedia Foundation board.
Except for the last bit of speculation this seems to appreciate the game.
Ec