Futures Of Open Source Information (FOOSI), For All You FOOSI-NIKS, Wherever You Are !!! Options Rating

That's what I thought I was here for, too.

Since projects in the Sanger-Wales mould — and I do mean Wiki-Phungi — of Wikipedia and Citizendium are just such evident (if not yet self-evident) dead horses as far as the Future Of Open Source Information (FOOSI) goes, I am naturally much more interested in converting what we can learn from their Wiki-Postmortems into some kind of guidance for the next round of experiments.

Now, I always thought that a certain amount of participatory parody of Wikipedia was just an obligatory but enjoyable part of the therapy, but maybe not everyone is seeing the joke. I dunno.

Jonny

Yes the FOOSI is most interesting. I'm glad to know there are like minds here.

So Let's Break Out Of That Meta*Review Cave and Pre-Amble Toward The Light !!!

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Mon 20th August 2007, 8:24pm

Since projects in the Sanger-Wales mould — and I do mean Wiki-Phungi — of Wikipedia and Citizendium are just such evident (if not yet self-evident) dead horses as far as the Future Of Open Source Information (FOOSI) goes, I am naturally much more interested in converting what we can learn from their Wiki-Postmortems into some kind of guidance for the next round of experiments.

Information doesn't want to be free. Information doesn't want anything. Some people want information to be free. Some people don't. No result is preordained.

I think the lesson of WP is about governance. Wales imbued to the project with his laissez-faire beliefs. His established weak institutions (weak WMF B/T, understaffed, individual donations funding, no accountability to stakeholders) and shifted all editorial guidance to an ill defined community. What has taken hold is the reign of the warlords of a dysfunctional social networking community. It is a tyranny akin to The Lord of Flies. It is toxic for any serious, knowledgeable person who would like to work on the encyclopedic project.

So the question is..."How can we better govern the next project of FOOSI?"

Information doesn't want to be free. Information doesn't want anything. Some people want information to be free. Some people don't. No result is preordained.

I think the lesson of WP is about governance. Wales imbued to the project with his laissez-faire beliefs. His established weak institutions (weak WMF B/T, understaffed, individual donations funding, no accountability to stakeholders) and shifted all editorial guidance to an ill defined community. What has taken hold is the reign of the warlords of a dysfunctional social networking community. It is a tyranny akin to The Lord of Flies. It is toxic for any serious, knowledgeable person who would like to work on the encyclopedic project.

I think those sentences are something that practically all of us agree on.

Whatever else Wikipedia may think it is, it is a warning for future historians about what can happen in weak societies when they try to establish truth by consensus, and fact by verifiability.

Since projects in the Sanger-Wales mould — and I do mean Wiki-Phungi — of Wikipedia and Citizendium are just such evident (if not yet self-evident) dead horses as far as the Future Of Open Source Information (FOOSI) goes, I am naturally much more interested in converting what we can learn from their Wiki-Postmortems into some kind of guidance for the next round of experiments.

Information doesn't want to be free. Information doesn't want anything. Some people want information to be free. Some people don't. No result is preordained.

I think the lesson of WP is about governance. Wales imbued to the project with his laissez-faire beliefs. His established weak institutions (weak WMF B/T, understaffed, individual donations funding, no accountability to stakeholders) and shifted all editorial guidance to an ill defined community. What has taken hold is the reign of the warlords of a dysfunctional social networking community. It is a tyranny akin to The Lord of Flies. It is toxic for any serious, knowledgeable person who would like to work on the encyclopedic project.

So the question is … "How can we better govern the next project of FOOSI?"

I gotta run off to dinner and a movie — Invasion of the Scientologists is playing at The Majestic tonight — so let me just recommend to your ATTN once again the remarks of The Kohser that I quoted in this post. There is nothing ill-defined about the architecture and dynamics of a through-composed, well-tempered confidence game — whether Dumb D'oh!volition or Intelligent Design on Duh Founderers' parts I leave to another time.

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Tue 21st August 2007, 2:21am

Information doesn't want to be free. Information doesn't want anything. Some people want information to be free. Some people don't. No result is preordained.

Nice post, GBG. I especially like the part I quoted above, and imagined someone saying something like this to a kool aide drinking Wikipedian, or like minded individual, and then imagined the dull look that would cross over their face. I bet it would be something like this:

I agree with the other assessments you made in your post as well.

An aside, WP has an article on the "Information wants to be free" statement, which appears to be the usual hodge podge of semi interesting material and utter bullshit.

My proposition still stick, why should we not build a true alternatives, learning from experience a better, more accurate product? The fact of a superior product will be the best critic against Wikipedia. We can even invite good contributors on that new project. Remaining on the level of simple criticism is not as constructive than a better product. A place where most people REALLY participate to write an encyclopedia.

Postmortem:

Successes:
1) Attracted tens of thousands of contributors. (someone must like anonymity)
2) Articles are often better than similar articles on other websites (clear, direct, leads are mainly good, or at least better than competing websites. Many articles are thorough and encyclopedic.)
3) Antisemitic, holocaust-denying, conspiracy theorizing whack-jobs that have been the bane of the internet so far not running amock.

Failures:
1) Overrun by role-playing schoolchildren and the unemployed
2) Unclear about licensing, plagiarism, copyvio, BLP, child protection, and a host of other legal problems
3) Article quality satisfactory sometimes, but never really great (garbled language, wordiness, boring, lengthy, academic tone, factual inaccuracies). Close to tipping point where poor edits exceed good ones
4) Current success aided by quirks of Google search engine
5) Axe-grinders and professionals taking ownership of some articles
6) Unable to retain good contributors and especially experts
7) Possible to identify contributors fairly easily (chilling effect on wanna-be anons)
8) 1000+ abusive and/or clueless admins
9) Broken, convoluted dispute resolution process
10) MediaWiki clunky and difficult for beginners
11) Better for now, but other websites bound to hire decent designers someday
12) Weak financials - no money to retool if another site begins to catch up

The free content site that could supercede Wikipedia:
1) Attracts thousands of contributors
2) Offers complete, thorough, virtually unbreakable anonymity and and only divulges names +/- IP addresses under court order.
3) Is fun to participate in.
4) Churns out quality articles
5) Has light-handed, nearly invisible admins
6) Has a clear, workable plan to keep itself out of legal trouble (rather than just whacking problems as they come up) and sticks to it in a predictable manner.
7) Will do well on Google (at least until Google goes away)

The site that could make free content encyclopedias obsolete:
1) A professional encyclopedia written by real paid writers
2) Web developers and marketing people are beaten with a stick until they stop crapping up the screen and make it as easy to get to relevant info as it is on Wikipedia.
3) No tricks to get you to subscribe or buy anything. Small, unobtrusive ads if anything.

Or something like that. I don't have much time to think now but these are just my impressions having been a WP contributor for about a year and a lurker/contributor here on WR for about a month.

Since projects in the Sanger-Wales mould — and I do mean Wiki-Phungi — of Wikipedia and Citizendium are just such evident (if not yet self-evident) dead horses as far as the Future Of Open Source Information (FOOSI) goes, I am naturally much more interested in converting what we can learn from their Wiki-Postmortems into some kind of guidance for the next round of experiments.

Information doesn't want to be free. Information doesn't want anything. Some people want information to be free. Some people don't. No result is preordained.

I think the lesson of WP is about governance. Wales imbued to the project with his laissez-faire beliefs. His established weak institutions (weak WMF B/T, understaffed, individual donations funding, no accountability to stakeholders) and shifted all editorial guidance to an ill defined community. What has taken hold is the reign of the warlords of a dysfunctional social networking community. It is a tyranny akin to The Lord of Flies. It is toxic for any serious, knowledgeable person who would like to work on the encyclopedic project.

So the question is … "How can we better govern the next project of FOOSI?"

I gotta run off to dinner and a movie — Invasion of the Scientologists is playing at The Majestic tonight — so let me just recommend to your ATTN once again the remarks of The Kohser that I quoted in this post. There is nothing ill-defined about the architecture and dynamics of a through-composed, well-tempered confidence game — whether Dumb D'oh!volition or Intelligent Design on Duh Founderers' parts I leave to another time.

Jonny

When I say Information, I am never thinking merely of the static product but always about the dynamic processes that dig it up and dole it out — let us say, the processes of Inquiry and Education, just to take one likely pair of names. Folding in all those extra words would've made for an ugly acronym, but let's try to keep the Process aspect of things in mind if not exactly cached in a Jonny Mnemonic way.

I would like to introduce Greg's analysis of a question that comes up again and again, because I think that it casts a high beam on very puzzling phenomenon that we need to examine before we go any further.

Duane, I have commented with thousands of words across the Internet about various ailments with which Wikipedia is afflicted. I won't rehash them here. What I'll instead do is present a short hypothesis about why intelligently-written new articles about "advanced" subjects are so frequently deleted from Wikipedia:

1. The majority of the most active administrators and administratively-oriented editors on Wikipedia are either minors, or they are adults who have not yet held salaried positions with management responsibilities. In this sense, they lack real-world experience in vast areas of knowledge.
2. Wikipedia has emerged as the most salient domain where these types of people have been able to elevate themselves to leadership positions, usually pseudonymously.
3. When they see a new article, skillfully written, about a subject area in which they lack expertise, their instinctive reaction is to delete it. Why? This will alienate the (probably older, more experienced) authors who created it, and therefore shore up their own power-control of the editorial process on their favorite website.

Source. Gregory Kohs, Re: Duane Nickull, "Has Wikipedia Been Hijacked?", 16 Aug 2007.

Jonny

This post has been edited by Jonny Cache: Tue 21st August 2007, 2:28am

Since projects in the Sanger-Wales mould — and I do mean Wiki-Phungi — of Wikipedia and Citizendium are just such evident (if not yet self-evident) dead horses as far as the Future Of Open Source Information (FOOSI) goes, I am naturally much more interested in converting what we can learn from their Wiki-Postmortems into some kind of guidance for the next round of experiments.

Information doesn't want to be free. Information doesn't want anything. Some people want information to be free. Some people don't. No result is preordained.

I think the lesson of WP is about governance. Wales imbued to the project with his laissez-faire beliefs. His established weak institutions (weak WMF B/T, understaffed, individual donations funding, no accountability to stakeholders) and shifted all editorial guidance to an ill defined community. What has taken hold is the reign of the warlords of a dysfunctional social networking community. It is a tyranny akin to The Lord of Flies. It is toxic for any serious, knowledgeable person who would like to work on the encyclopedic project.

So the question is … "How can we better govern the next project of FOOSI?"

I gotta run off to dinner and a movie — Invasion of the Scientologists is playing at The Majestic tonight — so let me just recommend to your ATTN once again the remarks of The Kohser that I quoted in this post. There is nothing ill-defined about the architecture and dynamics of a through-composed, well-tempered confidence game — whether Dumb D'oh!volition or Intelligent Design on Duh Founderers' parts I leave to another time.

Jonny

When I say Information, I am never thinking merely of the static product but always about the dynamic processes that dig it up and dole it out — let us say, the processes of Inquiry and Education, just to take one likely pair of names. Folding in all those extra words would've made for an ugly acronym, but let's try to keep the Process aspect of things in mind if not exactly cached in a Jonny Mnemonic way.

I would like to introduce Greg's analysis of a question that comes up again and again, because I think that it casts a high beam on very puzzling phenomenon that we need to examine before we go any further.

Duane, I have commented with thousands of words across the Internet about various ailments with which Wikipedia is afflicted. I won't rehash them here. What I'll instead do is present a short hypothesis about why intelligently-written new articles about "advanced" subjects are so frequently deleted from Wikipedia:

1. The majority of the most active administrators and administratively-oriented editors on Wikipedia are either minors, or they are adults who have not yet held salaried positions with management responsibilities. In this sense, they lack real-world experience in vast areas of knowledge.
2. Wikipedia has emerged as the most salient domain where these types of people have been able to elevate themselves to leadership positions, usually pseudonymously.
3. When they see a new article, skillfully written, about a subject area in which they lack expertise, their instinctive reaction is to delete it. Why? This will alienate the (probably older, more experienced) authors who created it, and therefore shore up their own power-control of the editorial process on their favorite website.

Source. Gregory Kohs, Re: Duane Nickull, "Has Wikipedia Been Hijacked?", 16 Aug 2007.

Jonny

Puzzling indeed. Identifying and excluding minors and inexperienced adults from leadership positions would be a big change, but I don't believe that it would remake Wikipedia into a paradise of fairness, egalitarianism, truth, and accuracy. Do you?

My proposition still stick, why should we not build a true alternatives, learning from experience a better, more accurate product? The fact of a superior product will be the best critic against Wikipedia. We can even invite good contributors on that new project. Remaining on the level of simple criticism is not as constructive than a better product. A place where most people REALLY participate to write an encyclopedia.

I've started encyc.org. If you have any good ideas, now's your chance to get in on the ground floor. I'm offering free Level 70 upgrades to the first ten contributors.

Thanks, have you already worked with the policies?

Puzzling indeed. Identifying and excluding minors and inexperienced adults from leadership positions would be a big change, but I don't believe that it would remake Wikipedia into a paradise of fairness, egalitarianism, truth, and accuracy. Do you?

Too much Cabernet to Internet right now, but what I saw in Greg's capsule assay was something like this:

It's not so much that people at different levels of experience, knowledge, maturity, whatever are brought together to work toward the same goals. People who have been thinking about and working toward the growth of genuine learning communities since long before Wikipedia came down the wikipike have seen no reason why such a mix could not sort itself out in a natural way, and to the benefit of all concerned.

But the Wikipedia Formula has poisoned the brew in a very peculiar way, and so the wikimedium that it infects is chock full of harmful ingredients that need to be isolated and removed before wiki environments can throng once more with life and wits — and not just thrive in the way of a virus that devours our humanity like hominy grits. I have struggled to articulate the critical flaws many times myself, but I think that Greg has succeeded in pinning down one of the biggest bugs in the ointment with as few words as possible.

Jonny

Thanks, have you already worked with the policies?

Not yet. I don't want to paint myself into a corner. They will probably be fairly minimalist, e.g. I think it would be best if we stuck with American English (I can't stand those wacky British spellings).

It's not so much that people at different levels of experience, knowledge, maturity, whatever are brought together to work toward the same goals. People who have been thinking about and working toward the growth of genuine learning communities since long before Wikipedia came down the wikipike have seen no reason why such a mix could not sort itself out in a natural way, and to the benefit of all concerned.

Could you give an example of one of these idyllic genuine learning communities? I used to mess around on USENET and found the signal to noise ratio was usually pretty low. As far as other wikis I haven't found anything remotely useful other than the documentation for some of them.

I've started encyc.org. If you have any good ideas, now's your chance to get in on the ground floor. I'm offering free Level 70 upgrades to the first ten contributors.

Well at least Encyclopedia Nova Caesarea does have a stub on New Jersey. I'd tease you worse if it didn't. Do you really suggest this is the way forward?

I've started encyc.org. If you have any good ideas, now's your chance to get in on the ground floor. I'm offering free Level 70 upgrades to the first ten contributors.

Well at least Encyclopedia Nova Caesarea does at least have a stub on New Jersey. I'd tease you worse if it didn't. Do you really suggest this is the way forward?

I don't see any other successful Wikipedia-competitors out there, especially ones not using the MediaWiki engine. So yes, yes I do see this as a baby step forward. I realize the odds of any wiki hitting critical mass are pretty slim, but I don't see what's to stop me from trying. At the very least, it's kind of fun to create encyclopedia articles from scratch. Kind of reminds me why I used to enjoy Wikipedia.

It's not so much that people at different levels of experience, knowledge, maturity, whatever are brought together to work toward the same goals. People who have been thinking about and working toward the growth of genuine learning communities since long before Wikipedia came down the wikipike have seen no reason why such a mix could not sort itself out in a natural way, and to the benefit of all concerned.

Could you give an example of one of these idyllic genuine learning communities? I used to mess around on USENET and found the signal to noise ratio was usually pretty low. As far as other wikis I haven't found anything remotely useful other than the documentation for some of them.

Oh gosh, I don't know of any Actual that achieves the Idyll, and UseNet would have been about the last thing that came to mind in that connection. The first requirement of a genuine learning community would have to be that its participants really want to learn, and more than they want a whole lot of other things that tend to get in the way. Given that, there's no reason why the rest of the structure cannot sort itself out in accord with who has the information and who wants the information about a given subject.

I know lots of people who appear, at least on the surface, to be as happy as larks in this or that setting. So the fact that I find the settings in question to be lacking in some respect is probably just that I'm asking too much.

Still, it seems that there are specific reasons for each of the less-than-ideal systems that I have known.

Jonny

Oxymoronic:

The free content site that could supercede Wikipedia:
...
2) Offers complete, thorough, virtually unbreakable anonymity and and only divulges names +/- IP addresses under court order.
...
5) Has light-handed, nearly invisible admins
6) Has a clear, workable plan to keep itself out of legal trouble (rather than just whacking problems as they come up) and sticks to it in a predictable manner.

You may as well add:
7) Changes human nature, society, and hundreds of years of legal evolution, and makes it possible for everyone to live happily ever after.

I've started encyc.org. If you have any good ideas, now's your chance to get in on the ground floor. I'm offering free Level 70 upgrades to the first ten contributors.

Well at least Encyclopedia Nova Caesarea does at least have a stub on New Jersey. I'd tease you worse if it didn't. Do you really suggest this is the way forward?

I don't see any other successful Wikipedia-competitors out there, especially ones not using the MediaWiki engine. So yes, yes I do see this as a baby step forward. I realize the odds of any wiki hitting critical mass are pretty slim, but I don't see what's to stop me from trying. At the very least, it's kind of fun to create encyclopedia articles from scratch. Kind of reminds me why I used to enjoy Wikipedia.

Well I guess that's sincere. I think you should solicit 2 or 3 very strong articles prior to roll out. Each with a very small team (2 or 3) editors and copy edited as more or less finished and polished pieces. You could refer to them as the standard you would like to meet in other article. Don't encourage a "granular" editing. The idea is to show collaboration doesn't need to be a hodge-podge.

I think it would be best if we stuck with American English (I can't stand those wacky British spellings).

Oh - so that's me excluded then.

I think it would be best if we stuck with American English (I can't stand those wacky British spellings).

Groan. Yeah those English are so weird in the way they spell er... English. And who needs the British anyway? What have they ever contributed to encyclopaedia building?

The free content site that could supercede Wikipedia:
...
2) Offers complete, thorough, virtually unbreakable anonymity and and only divulges names +/- IP addresses under court order.

Please be aware that one of the most important and consistent complaints about WP is the anonymity of the contributors. It is often given as the core cause for its failings.

Sorry to sound negative, but I urge you to really consider whether you have the stomach to start something like this. That's not a good start.