2010-12-29 08:31, Neil Kandalgaonkar: > I've been inspired by the discussion David Gerard and Brion Vibber > kicked off, and I think they are headed in the right direction. > > But I just want to ask a separate, but related question. > > Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you > are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be > paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following: > > 1 - Become a more attractive home to the WP editors. Get them to work on > your content. > > 2 - Take the free content from WP, and use it in this new system. But > make it much better, in a way Wikipedia can't match. > > 3 - Attract even more readers, or perhaps a niche group of > super-passionate readers that you can use to build a new community. > > In other words, if you had no legacy, and just wanted to build something > from zero, how would you go about creating an innovation that was > disruptive to Wikipedia, in fact something that made Wikipedia look like > Friendster or Myspace compared to Facebook? > > And there's a followup question to this -- but you're all smart people > and can guess what it is.
If one would have a budget of gazillions of dollars then it would be quite easy ;-). The problem is - what would be the point of investing such money if you wouldn't get it back from this investment? If you wouldn't have such money (mostly to pay users for creating content), then the most problematic part would be to convince community you are OK. IMHO this has nothing to do with usability or any such thing it's rather a matter of gaining trust. A part from that you would have to make all (or almost all) the things that work now work. If you would make a brand new software then you would have to rewrite at least most popular user scripts which would alone be a lot work. You would probably also have to make a nice WYSIWYG to make your site worth moving to. To make it worth to change at least some of user habits. Not to mention your site would need to build on a quikcly scalable infrastructure to guarantee high availabilty (at least as high as Wikipedia is). In general, you have to remember that even if something is technically better it's not guaranteed to be successful. For example I think that DP (pgdp.net) and Rastko are technically better equiped for proofreading then Wikisource, but I guess for thoose already familiar with MediaWiki it's easier to create texts for Wikisource. Regards, Nux. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
