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Why an Encyclopedia is harder to write than Linux

March 31st, 2008 by dogbiscuit

In amongst the many and varied discussions, users of our forums make insightful observations which deserve highlighting. One such post is in response to this comment by Wolfe:

“If people can write a functional open source operating system, there is no reason why they can’t write an encyclopaedia.”

UseOnceAndDestroy writes:

This comparison keeps turning up, and while it sounds reasonable on a sloganeering level, its fundamentally wrong.

The driver for the development of Linux is real and pressing - the movement of mass computing to a monolithic, corporately-controlled standard is stiflingly unhealthy, and OSS breeds diversity and invention. Particularly, had LAMP [Editors note: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP] not been created, a lot of the web innovation of the last decade likely wouldn’t have happened. Good-quality developers were drawn to OSS for good reasons, and established a decent level of governance because you just can’t engineer software without it. Because the technically incompetent don’t last long, Linux benefits from a virtuous circle: better software = more users = more developers = better software.

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Posted at 4:19 pm, March 31st, 2008 by dogbiscuit in General Information, Software, Wiki-Psychology | No Comments »

So what if it is broken?

February 11th, 2008 by The Review

This post was submitted to the Wikipedia Review forum in February 2008 by the Reviewer “Dogbiscuit”:

Dogbiscuit: Not so long ago, Gomi did a pretty good summary of what was wrong with Wikipedia (enshrined in blogland now). In recent posts, there have been some observations about why this is a problem. I’m sure others can put this in more learned ways, but I would like to set it out in simple terms, for public consumption.

Clearly, the context is that Wikipedia is omnipresent on the Internet, but I thought it would be useful to enumerate why this concerns me, or us. I don’t think it is simply a matter for academic accuracy, but a wider concern about the ability to misinform on a wider scale.

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Posted at 9:17 am, February 11th, 2008 by The Review in General Information | 5 Comments »

Top 10 most viewed WR threads

September 24th, 2007 by Nathan

This was originally written by Kato today at 4:15am.

With all this talk of “Attack sites” and BADSITES on WP, and descriptions of The Review getting thrown about on the ARBCOM pages, it seems like a good time to go and examine the Top ten most viewed threads in The Review’s back catalogue. Though this thread should probably be in the Wikipedia Review Review section, so as not to disappoint our non-signed up members, this one goes out for free on the top section. Read the rest of this entry »