On 31 December 2010 00:08, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 31 December 2010 00:02, Platonides <platoni...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> There's an extension to 'delete' pages by blanking. I find that approach >> much more wiki. > > > "Pure wiki deletion" is a perennial proposal. One problem is that > there doesn't appear to be a wiki anywhere that actually uses it, or > ever have been one. (I've asked for examples before - does anyone have > any?) This suggests that the biggest wiki in the world might not be > the greatest place to be the very first. >
If you want to being the biggest wiki in the world to mean anything, you need to innovate. Wikipedia will continue to stagnate if everyone is too scared to try out new stuff. This is in my mind the biggest problem facing Wikimedia — it's suffering from complete feature-freeze because everyone is so scared of making a mistake. On all fronts, encyclopedic, social, technical, nothing has really moved forward at all for the last year or two. Sure, we've optimized a few workflows, tightened a few procedures, and added some content — but there's no innovation, nothing exciting and new. Evolution is the best model we have for how to build something, the way to keep progress going is to continually try new things; if they fail, "meh", if they succeed — "yay"! There are no planning meetings, no months of deliberation about exactly what shape a finger should be. Sure, nothing built by evolution is "perfect", but that's fine, it will continue to get better in ways not even imaginable from this point in time (everyone knows you can't see into the future, so stop wasting time trying). One reason that wikis are such a good way of creating content is that they use the same process — anyone can make a random change. If it is good, it is kept; if not it isn't. The same model is appearing in other places too. Github allows random people to change software, and only the good stuff gets merged. Google does the same: Wave was a fun idea, it turns out it was also useless — oh well, lesson learnt, move on. There is no Wikipedia-killer in a concrete sense. The world will continue to evolve. Wikipedia has a simple choice: evolve or get left behind. Conrad _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
