

Wikipedia is anti-competitive.  Should open source be similarly so? - amichail
http://www.google.com/buzz/102027212307619239744/fNW5J4oPD9r/Wikipedia-is-anti-competitive-In-particular

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scott_s
Is this your hack so that your random questions get a higher ranking?

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amichail
Would you be happier if I submitted a blogger link to the same text?

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fragmede
The brevity of the question makes it quite suitable for an AskHN post.

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scott_s
amichail has a habit of submitting many Ask HN posts that aren't really
questions to the community, but are more stream-of-consciousness musings. Non-
link posts take a ranking hit because pg assumes they're less likely to have
meaningful content; if I recall correctly, he wants to avoid people using HN
as their blog.

amichail has complained about this policy several times. Hence my question if
this is his hack to get around pg's policy.

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amichail
I don't submit many of these posts now though.

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bradbeattie
I think the analogy is somewhat flawed. You can always fork Wikipedia's data
and create your own with whatever rules you'd like. A closer analog might be
OpenOffice. You don't have multiple spreadsheet apps in that one suite; It
just wouldn't make sense.

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amichail
Wikipedia is such an overwhelming success at this point that forking its data
won't gain you much.

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lukifer
Wikipedia does compete, in the sense of debating over which edits to keep.
Ultimately, it also competes for mindshare with the rest of the internet, and
other wikis (usually ones that focus on a particular topic).

I think the open source world can learn a lot from Wikipedia's social
operating model, but there's no reason that there shouldn't be multiple open-
source solutions to solve the same problem.

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amichail
But central to Wikipedia's success is not allowing similar articles.

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lukifer
One could see that as equivalent to a large OSS project that forbids you from
writing two versions of the same function. Rewrite or improve the old one to
be the new canonical version, or fork the whole thing into a new project, but
no adding extra noise that'll have to be maintained.

One thing is to keep in mind too is the immense scale of Wikipedia, which is
not true of all OSS. Any large project pretty much _has_ to use a similar
model of competitive cooperation and rules of the road (or sometimes just an
authoritarian leader), or it quickly spirals into chaos.

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amichail
Consider what it would be like if open source developers could only create one
text editor with no possibility of forking at any point. How good would the
result be?

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bradbeattie
You analogy assumes that open source developers are all working under the same
banner, creating a singular suite of applications (e.g. OpenOffice).

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aw3c2
Judging by the zealots I say Wikipedia is much too competitive, at least in
the minds of many of its controlling users.

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amichail
It's a different sort of competition.

