Wikipedia Review: Opinions and Editorials

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 �

Wikipedia: Community Has Not Scaled

January 17th, 2008 by The Review

This piece was written by The Review’s resident Agony-Aunt, Somey, and first published on his Wikiphrenia site in May 2007.

Wikipedia is really, really big.

Impossibly big. So big, in fact, that nobody can really get their head around how big it is. That very bigness tends to cause a few problems. In some cases, big problems.

As MeatballWiki puts it:

“When a group grows from dozens of individuals to thousands, it becomes impossible to feel any real acquaintance with more than a fraction of the population. When this happens, community standards and unwritten rules stop working. The group loses focus. Things fall apart.”

What are some of the manifestations of this problem, though? It’s all well and good to say “things fall apart” - it’s a lot like saying “Wikipedia is on the verge of collapse” or “Wikipedia is heading for a massive implosion.” Terms like “lose focus,” “collapse,” and “implode” are very handy - they’re often used by people who can see that something’s failing, but can’t quite explain the nature of the failure, or even the likely result of it. Of course, since this is Wikiphrenia.com, we know that the primary effects of failure are psychological, but the secondary effects are often quite practical - or rather, impractical.

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Posted at 6:28 am, January 17th, 2008 by The Review in Software, Wiki-Psychology | 6 Comments �

Wikipedia Review: Opinions and Editorials

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Why an Encyclopedia is harder to write than Linux

Wikipedia: Community Has Not Scaled

Wikipedia is really, really big.