wikipedia gets gazillions of hits but it's free for all. yet is clearly not a free-for-all concerning its internal processes. an interesting 'architecture'. re simon and 'social media'.
one wonders what has kept it being free for all. because in some ways it's worth millions of dollars. the answer, of course, is if it wasn't free for all, few people would use it. there's the catch 22. also, what makes wikipedia unique and alive is its openness to public contributions together with its mainly volunteer, steeply numerous 'personnel'. some say it will eventually work out a revenue model, beyond donations, that capitalizes on its economic potential. i'm not so sure of that. it seems to be doing ok as it is. as an exciting, relevant, very ambitious contribution to humanity's access to erm knowledge. does the continued success of the project actually depend, fundamentally, on refining this pseudo-corporate, pseudo-socialist architecture of volunteer contributions and keeping it free for all without being a 'free-for-all'? i expect it does. so probably if there is a business model, it revolves around other related projects, rather than messing too much with what is quite successful, in its own way. my experience of getting a legitimate article on wikipedia was like a game of snakes and ladders or something. and the 'editor' i mainly encountered was not knowlegeable about the field he was editing. and i encountered philistineosphies and rumoured sects of "m:deletionism", "m:inclusionism" and "m:eventualism". i think the 'm' is for 'meta', as in http://meta.wikimedia.org very odd. but 'eventually' it seemed to work out, as was also your experience, helen, apparently. one is not left with a sense of firm conviction in the ability of the fleshy mechanism to do the right thing. rather, one is surprised when it does. and it takes quite a while. but we both eventually planted the articles successfully. ja http://vispo.com _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
