6 Feb 2002 mirwin   » (Master)

placeholder Rambling regarding wikipedia

It is unfortunate (If one wishes to have a free online collaboration encompassing a large subset of human knowledge online and freely available.) but I think it has already hit some self limitations.

Some discussions on the site make it obvious that there is some conflict pending regarding the use of the material and the organization of the community. While it advertised as open or free content there is some stratification developing between owners of the site, sysops, contributors, and users. The site owners wish anyone using the material to link back to the original site ..... natural enough and it has obvious commercial potential to eventually fund the site's requirements such as bandwidth, processing, disk space, sysop salary, shareholder dividends, etc.

The question that has to be answered (IMHO) for the site's long term stability and prosperity is why contributors will continue to contribute if sufficient commercial success occurs to fund sufficient bandwidth and access to a majority of the globe's internet users. Otherwise someone else who successfully answers this question will eventually displace this site.

I think contributor governed foundations similar to the gnome foundation will eventually come to dominate large successful collaborative efforts on the web. Anything else will eventually lose the majority of contributors to some effort where they have some input equivalent or weighted somehow to their contribution. Most people get plenty of hiearchy in existing societies and organizations to meet their daily quota, why seek some more out? Casual contributions will surely continue at some pace, but some of the site's discussions seek to interest highly qualified specialists and experts in contributing at little or no cost to the site. Alternatively, if paid specialists are introduced then will the more numerous casual contributers continue to participate?

Anyway, I am looking it over for application to online technical journals or free engineering projects. Adding an advogato style trust metric generalized to a peer to peer model to a wiki and formulating an appropriate self governing charter for a focused activity seems to have a lot of potential as a general starting point or method of expanding successful clubs, projects, or societies.

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