19 December 2005

Will Wikipedia Fork?






Cameron Mulder said...

I have been thinking about a Wikipedia Fork recently.

Wikipedia is amazing, and i don't want to put down the project in any way.

But to me i don't understand why they havn't started recruiting editors for major articals.

There are plenty of people out there with masters and PHd's that i am sure would be willing to sign up for something like that.

My personal idea is to have a joint wikipedia/yahoo answers type thing.

You would have the normal artical, then a place to post questions that vetted people would then answer.

Oh well, i guess someone else beat me to the forking of wikipedia, maybe next time.

glyn moody said...

This seems to be a matter of culture: the main people behind Wikipedia believe strongly that it is better without editors.

But certainly, the experience of other open projects suggests a more hierarchical approach might help.

Scott Carpenter said...

I hadn't heard of Digital Universe and thought for a moment that Sanger's Citizendium had been renamed.

Here's Andrew Orlowski at The Register on Citizendium as a Wikipedia fork and Clay Shirky had a couple of very interesting posts about the subject here and more in depth here.

(Corante is unfortunately down at the moment, but I'd highly recommend checking back. I think in the first article, Shirky points to a counterpoint by Sanger.)

Scott Carpenter said...

Oops! This post showed up in my feed reader as a new post and I replied without noticing it is a year old. It seemed strange that you wouldn't have mentioned Citizendium and now I see why. I should realize you're more current than that!

In any case, if you haven't read the Shirky articles, I still highly recommend them. :-)

glyn moody said...

Sorry about the spring cleaning at Christmas....

Thanks for the links anyway.