On Thu, March 14, 2013 8:47 am, Lars Aronsson wrote:

> Before discussing a new tool, what are we trying to achieve?
> Anyone can install the Mediawiki software, with or without
> some extensions, and try new ideas on a small scale, but
> what are those ideas that you want to try?

I continue to be bewildered about why any kind of Wiki software is 
desirable at this point. Wikis are great tools for documentation and 
exposition, but not so great for discussion and consensus. Beware the 
hammer/nail syndrome: "When your only tool is a hammer, every problem 
looks like a nail."

> What else is needed, and what role does OpenLibrary
> play? When we know this, I think we can find the
> right tool for the task.

+10!

Right now, it appears to me that Open Book Catalog is lacking a vision 
and a visionary. Even the platitude "one web page for every book" is so 
broad as to be essentially meaningless. That is what we already have, so 
what's missing? The data may be incomplete, it may be unreliable, it may 
be unreusable for legal reasons, it may be unreusable for technical 
reasons, and it may not lead to any actual content, but hey, there /is/ 
one web page for every book!

A wiki is a great way to expose our vision to the world, and to help the 
rest of the world to profit from that vision, but it's a lousy way to 
develop the vision in the first place. A contentious (and archived) 
mailing list is a much better tool for that. When a vision is in place 
/then/ we can decide how to surface it.

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