Journal athloi's Journal: Wikipedia isn't F/OSS, it's graffiti 1
Like most of you, I have a day job, although I'd like to be so rich I didn't have to, some day. At my day job we have meetings. Meetings are basically a cheap way of disguising our inner animal, which wants to growl at others. If we just did that, meetings would be tolerable, but instead we've got several tons of politics and politeness to mask the fact we want to fight it out.
At last week's generically named meeting in which we decide strategy even though it was originally called as a meeting series to decide on client representation issues, I brought up the idea of switching our designer workstations to RAID and removing the CPUs to a nearby room, running them remotely. I did this because our designers complain (rightfully, with my full support) that two things afflict them in life: periodic machine crashes, and the loud noise of their Dell computers. In my view, it's a legitimate request, and I made a good case, until I mentioned that I'd seen how to do the remote linking on WikiPedia.
"Oh no, Wikipedia," says one of our management people. "You were going well until you mentioned that."
As it turns out, I looked up something today on Wikipedia, and did get burned, although I'm the only one I know. I'm not going to reveal which entry it was because I want to see how long it takes someone to fix it, but I think it's off their radar so it could be years. This prompted some thoughts on wikipedia, since I really like it as a resource and have used it for years, being a resolute early adopter. My friends all know I'll check it first, then branch out to other searches, and so far I remain a fan.
But if I were to change wikipedia, I'd make it more like the F/OSS movement. Open Source Software projects are projects. Each application might be an analogue to a general topic in wikipedia, with each entry related to that being part of the project. If I'm doing an entry on lizards, there are going to be several subconcepts: types of lizards, medical concepts about lizards, lizards in popular lore, and so on. These will each require several dictionary entries each, making "lizards" a project with many small projects. In the F/OSS world, someone would lead the "lizards" project, and developers would get delegated to each single entry beneath it. The difference between this and the current wikipedia model is that when any entry beneath "lizards" would require more entries, like an entry on medical data derived from lizards, it would get assigned a project manager or lead developer like happens in F/OSS projects.
True open content isn't paranoid, and it's not up for any idiot to edit, either. Wikipedia isn't opensource in the same way OSS is, it's opensource in the way a graffiti wall is. If OSS developers ran an encyclopedia, they'd assign developer project managers to each entry and the entries would be actually informative, unlike Wikipedia's mishmash of gossip, plagiarism and political revenge fantasies.
We'll have to disagree on that one... (Score:1)