I would suggest you avoid joining organisations. I find myself regularly fending off attempts by small volunteer organisations to suck me into them. I suggest just coming up with compelling statements of good ideas that inspire others. Then they can do the work. Volunteer dilettante lightly-herded cat, that’s the sweet spot!

At the West Coast Wikicon San Francisco 10th anniversary unconference I proposed that instead of competition by a fork or a new encyclopedia, we need to set up an overlapping organization (i.e. a California Chapter) sharing employees with the Foundation at the bottom of the hierarchy (instead of the top like Wikia.) The slides are at http://talknicer.com/wm10ca/wm10ca.pdf

The basic idea is that the Foundation has far too few measurement statistics and no competition for doing things like not pushing out too much javascript to mobile devices, making simple language wikipedias for beginning language learners, nurturing and encouraging administrators, advocating for political change which could reduce Foundation overhead costs, curating low stakes assessment content, doing media upload, or even testing all the submitted fundraising banner ideas, etc. A competing organization and measurements of the performance of both organizations could serve to encourage increased performance.

The idea was well received by Michael Snow (who mentioned that it would relieve the pressure from international organizations which object to the Foundation’s Public Policy project’s US-centric focus, among other things), James Forrester, and everyone else who expressed an opinion so far. I gave a copy of the presentation with some notes later on to Craig Newmark and Clay Shirky, and I hope to write up everyone’s reactions to it soon. (Please note that I’m not asking for a leadership role in such a new organization, beyond what it takes to set it up and put someone with more experience and community support in charge.)

Here is my wish list
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:A_central_wiki_for_interlanguage_links#First_step_towards_a_Central_database_of_facts

Infinithree starts with the goal of being ‘avowedly inclusionist’ – relaxing the traditional ‘encyclopedic’ standards which have exiled some topics and details from Wikipedia. (Such exiled topics often then become the purview of redundant, cynical SEO content mills.)

Infinithree falls most squarely under your option (b) – varying the rules. I agree wholeheartedly that any potential alternative needs to stake out somewhere new in the possibility space – an almost-but-not-quite Wikipedia can’t grow alongside Wikipedia; the negative allelopathy is too strong.

I believe MediaWiki software itself overconstrains the necessary exploration, so Infinithree will *not* be Yet Another MediaWiki Installation (“?³:NOTYAMWI”). I can’t yet point to the alternative software – it’s in very early development – but infinithree.org and @infinithree exist to discuss possibilities and discover potential collaborators.

Let us start from here. Wikipedia defines “knowledge” in a rather old-fashioned manner: as information stored in some media. How to compete with this? For example, one can adopt the enactivist definition: knowledge=interaction.

An encyclopedia of live human interactions, with information as the context for the interactions, seems the next logical step. Observing this year’s crop of aggregator tools that mesh collaboration and content much better than ever, I am optimistic it will happen rather soon.

* “I wonder at competitors that attempt to solve problems of huge success, but don’t address the problem of utter obscurity, i.e. the one they actually have.”
* “Wikipedia is, of course, a miserable failure. How can we duplicate this failure?”
* “I can picture a model in which lots of other people write what turn out to be feeder wikis for Wikipedia. But I can’t see what’s really in it for the volunteers on those wikis.”

At this rate, perhaps we’re now close to being “Too Big To Fail”. That’s worrying of course, but also comforting.

The key, I have felt since the earliest days, is to encourage the spread of the culture. Above I’ve discussed a simple technical fix that would encourage site forking and keep up information exchange. In your posting you suggest using free licencing for really useful stuff in the hope that the rest of the world will just join in because they see that we’re doing it right.

But it does worry me that this kind of thing often hasn’t happened, even when it probably should. I was frankly astounded, very early on, to find out that Wikipedia didn’t already have peering arrangements with other wikis, and I’m talking about 2004.

For relatively obscure academic topics where a large amount of knowledge is currently concentrated in small departments, I think the opportunity to peer with Wikipedia could sell quite well.

(to be continued)

The end result was a static hyperlinked document with no editing interface, so it wasn’t really a Wikipedia competitor, only a presentation style directed at academic institutions that had concerns about citing a source that might be changed to say “Lame wiki is lame” at any moment.

Well, academic institutions have legitimate concerns about Wikipedia but they probably cannot be addressed by such methods. I suppose it failed to make a splash because it didn’t really solve the problem. Academics, I think, actually like the idea of wikis, but they like to retain reasonable control of the content.

The peering I discuss here doesn’t do anything that couldn’t be done manually, it just uses an adaptation of the mediawiki history feature to make different communities aware of one another’s work. And makes it a bit easier to merge in new content.

So, I think this would be one way of addressing the problem of single points of failure and encouraging the growth of externally hosted communities that have a reasonably informal peering arrangement.

I’ve deliberately skimmed over a lot of the detail here, but I think it’s clear that a peering arrangement like this would require on code changes at all. You could write a bot to copy revisions like this in a couple of minutes, with most decent bot frameworks, and the rest is just a matter of human interaction–the communities would both have to want to do this and their site content cultures would have to be compatible (not only NPOV etc but also various points of style).

So technically, we could do this today (or indeed, years ago).
(END)

So, somebody at the MIT wiki looks at their local copy of Wikipedia’s article on the programming language Python. Having been inducted into Wikipedia’s basic ethics by MIT she knows how to improve the article with her knowledge. She expands several sections by covering, say, the use of Python in research environments.

A few days later a peering bot grabs all her edits and edits the Wikipedia article to include all of her edits, with appropriate attribution, them restores the Wikipedia article to its previous state and makes a note on the talk page. Meanwhile there were some edits on the Wikipedia version of the article, and there are entered into the MIT version of the article.

At this point all licence holders have equal access to one another’s work, and may adopt it in toto, merge in what they like, or ignore it. Over time the different copies of the article may diverge greatly.

(to be continued)

Didn’t Veropedia sort of try that? (What ended up happening to Veropedia?)

A few years ago I tried to work out how a peering arrangement for parallel Wikipedias could work. Peer sites would in effect have proxy accounts, and edits would appear on selected pages. As a practical example, say MIT as part of its teaching syllabus gave credits for collaborative editing on topics in programming languages. They create a closed mediawiki instance and arrange peering of the relevant articles with English Wikipedia. Peering is performed by an exchange of revisions, after which each wiki is returned to its “native” state (ie, the latest revision is a copy of the local state of the article before the peered revisions were introduced). A note is entered on the talk page explaining what was done and delivering any information needed for licence compliance.

(continued in my next post)