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Jimmy Wales's Open Source Collaboration Tips
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jan 30, 2007 02:19 PM
from the unpunishing-good-deeds dept.
from the unpunishing-good-deeds dept.
destinyland writes "In a new interview Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales acknowledges his debt to Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation and discusses his new open source search project. He applauds the way Open Source developers work around their ideological differences, acknowledges that he's an Ayn Rand objectivist who's skeptical of the wisdom of crowds, and blames Slashdot for his grandstanding comment that Wikipedia would bury Encyclopedia Brittanica within five years."
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Wikipedia Founder Introduces Wiki Magazine Sites 114 comments
KingJawa writes "Wikipedia blew away Encyclopedia Brittanica, but can the model be used to upset the magazine industry? Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, thinks so. His company, Wikia, today announced three open-source magazine-style sites where users can write about news, opinion and gossip — one magazine wiki each for politics, entertainment, and local interests. Each open-source magazine hands total editorial control to the readers, allowing them to read, write, edit, and dictate the editorial feel for each topic."
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Article and title don't match... (Score:4, Informative)
http://producingoss.com/html-chunk/index.html [producingoss.com]
OSS idealogical differences... what a crock! (Score:4, Insightful)
I know of no successful open source software projects run that way. On all the successful open source projects only few are granted write access to cvs/svn and most open source projects are run by one or two very opinionated people who do not accomodate others on a whim. In most cases, people finding a problem submit a patch and onte of the trusted few will apply it. In many cases, the patch will not be applied directly, but will be rewritten to achieve the desired effect better.
Sure people can take all the code and fork the project, but that is very different to having control over the document. You very seldom get wikipeia-style edit wars in OSS code bases because "the boss" does not tolerate it. Abuse the privaledge of write access and you lose it.
To draw a parallels between Wikipedia (which is uncontrolled) and Open Source (which is controlled) just does Open Source a disservice. There's enough anti-Open Source FUD out there and we don't need people thinking that any dummy with a chip on their shoulder can modifyt open source.
Parent
If you don't believe in the wisdom of crowds (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe the problem is that wikipedia, as it is currently designed, doesn't tap into that wisdom as effectively as a market does.
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Dude, that's what the crowd does.
KFG
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you should throw all your money at the stock market, because if you have any brains whatsoever you can get rich. You should certainly be able to predict better than those stupid crowds whether the stock will go up or down.
Hmmm.... Am I to take it that you believe that the crowds "predict" the stock market?
That's a fallacy, and is akin to saying that voters predict the outcome of elections. Just as the voters determine the winner of an election, the crowd -- the market -- steer the value of stocks.
HAL.
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Try something simpler, like prediction markets (example: intrade.com). The crowd predicts the chances of whatever happening. For example right now it is predicting that the chance of Obama being the democratic candidate is around 19%. Do you think you can consistantly predict more accurately? If you can, you can make a ton of money.
Stock markets are basically the same thing. Calling it a "fallacy" is ridiculous....its just a way of looking at things, and a valid one.
Stock market vs. betting parlor (Score:2)
If you bet on whether Obama is going to be the next Democratic presidential candidate, your bet doesn't directly influence the outcome (except perhaps in some very indirect, butterfly-effect-like fashion, but we'll ignore that). The two are independent. It's just like betting on a horse race, or a footbal
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Note that you can play the prediction markets the same way, betting on the price of the shares (selling prior to the date of the election/game etc)
In any case, if it makes it easier to see the point, just talk about prediction markets. You are left with one of two logical conclusions: 1) the crowd is remarkably accura
Re:If you don't believe in the wisdom of crowds (Score:4, Insightful)
On that basis predicting the weather should be easy, since molecules in the atmosphere are dumb as rocks, even dumber that dumb people.
And yet... weather forecasting requires supercomputers.
You're confusing dumbness with predictability. They're not the same thing, although dumb people can be predictable sometimes.
Parent
Yeah, well (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, according to Wikipedia, the number of years in which Wikipedia will bury Encyclopedia Brittanica has tripled in the last six months.
Re:Yeah, well (Score:4, Funny)
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Reality (Score:2)
Audio version of the interview (Score:4, Informative)
No, he does not blame Slashdot. (Score:3, Informative)
Come on, summarizer! This is the guy from Wikipedia, who discusses the importance of distinguishing a channel from its content just a bit higher up in TFA, for crying out loud. Read the damn thing!
Crowds always make good decisions (Score:4, Funny)
Two more (Score:5, Interesting)
- Oust your co-founder and start claiming that you are the sole founder. It's okay if your organization's own [wikipedia.org] past [wikipedia.org] press releases [wikipedia.org] contradict what you are now saying. No one will notice!
- Claim that the majority of work is done by a group of people who actually don't really contribute that much [aaronsw.com].
I'm sure there's more.Claim that anyone who isn't in the groupthink (Score:5, Interesting)
Advocate banning "trolls" whenever possible, especially when they threaten to expose malfeasance on the part of your worst employees.
Call one of your detractors a "disease" in your IRC channels, then deny you said it (even though it was logged) and create an entire "biography" on the person devoted solely to libeling them, in violation of publication laws and your own "standards" for biographical entries.
Suggest in your logged, publicly available email lists for the project that "lone wolves" should start filing dishonest "complaints" with the hosting ISP against a site critical of your behavior.
Take the money donated for "the project" and build a new house with it.
Parent
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No Sight of the Cite of the site (Score:3, Funny)
Do what I do (Score:3, Funny)
The secret to not being a lame-o Objectivist. (Score:4, Insightful)
Then I realized that there aren't all these super-human man-god objectivists that are being held down by the evil-evader looters. Really the world is a big soup of mediocrity, confusion, uncertainty and incompetence and everybody just tries the best they can. Even people who are genius architects are probably about average as track atheletes or at writing poetry. Thus the need to co-operate with other people who are good at different things and the need for humility, listening to people, etc.
Really Rand is a reflection more generally of Russian thought which is that everything is either perfect and godlike or low, despicable and corrupt. Look at the characters in the Brothers Karamozov for example. The real world is a lot more ambiguous.
One project too many? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ayn Rand? The fan dancer? (Score:5, Insightful)
What does Ayn Rand have to do with philosophy? Indeed. Whenever someone professes admiration for Ayn Rand, I can only assume that it is out of ignorance, a mere reading of her two fat novels without any training in real philosophy. I recently read Jeff Walker's The Ayn Rand Cult [amazon.com] (Open Court, 1998) which, besides being a chronicle of how many lives her and her immediate followers wrecked, talks much about how the philosophy community--even scholars with ethical views similar to her own--reject her work as lacking in rigour, containing much inconsistency and back-peddling, and showing a lack of understanding of the earlier philosophers she cites (putting words into Kant's mouth, for example).
It doesn't reflect well on Jimbo at all to claim such a crackpot and madwoman as a role model. Besides, isn't part of Objectivism supposedly rejecting gurus? Why doesn't Jimbo just say he's an individualist, why bring up Rand at all?
Parent
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You sound like you were beaten up by an Objectivist in college.
"Really, whenever someone professes such hostility toward an old dead woman who wrote turgid novels, I can only assume that it is out of indolence, a mere reading of Walker's book, and a lack of any real training in Objectivism, etc..."
Lighten up. Or you'll get Piekoff on your case.
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Because a lot more people know about Rand and what she wrote than actually understand the implication of the term Objectivist. It's the easiest way of explaining it to most people.
Re:Ayn Rand? The fan dancer? (Score:4, Funny)
You're a brilliant innovator. Really. You'd show us... but we're not worthy of benefiting from your genius.
You replaced your subscription of Penthouse with the Wall Street Journal and read it for the same purpose.
Whenever you visit a national park you lament all the sky scrapers that should have been built there instead.
You day dream about escaping to Galt's Gulch, even though the male\female ratio is something like 10:1. Hey, it worked for the Smurfs.
It takes you 20 minutes to explain to people the concept of "A thing is itself" and wonder why people think you are condescending.
Parent
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There are a small number of people (a few dozen worldwide, maybe) who don't fall into that category, and Jimmy is one of them. Although his background is primarily in economics and I wouldn't accuse him of being a deep philosophical thinker, in the mid-90's he organized and ran th
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We are all free to engage in behavior which we find pleasing. Please don't call yours altruism when in fact, you derive plea
Re:Ayn Rand? The fan dancer? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Rationalization (Score:3, Insightful)
Weird. Normal people rationalize away their greed and selfishness. I never realized that Rand's followers rationalized altrusim, instead...
I'm not complaining, mind you--I'd much rather you were altrusitic than some greedy asshole--but I confess that the notion of rationalizing it seems odd to me. You usually only rationalize bad things
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Have you actually been to Wikipedia lately?
At any rate, I agree that Rand would hate Wikipedia, but only because of its "everyone has a say" open-source traits. Though of course Wikipedia is now making some people "more equal than others."
Rob
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I think the word "altruism" doesn't mean what you think it means. I've seen plenty of people on Wikipedia attacking others to further their own status - some editors attack too, not just "vandals". Wikipedia is an exercise in vanity as much as it is even approaching altruism. As to Jimbo exploiting people... certainly not ob
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That sounds pretty "selfless". Now some of the individuals who make up Wikipedia might be assholes, but I don't really do much work there, so I don't know. I contribute because I want to make things better for others. I want everyone to have access to correct information, not because I get a hard-on for having more edits than som
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Rubbish. As well to say that Rand (or any Objectivist, for that matter) would disapprove of someone volunteering to help out on the local library council. Or promoting an effort to build a new library, for that matter.
Rather, the "exact oppposite"
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http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/23/neuroscience
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Why would Rand care about something done for this nebulous "everyone", especially when no one pays for it?
Only collectivism creates individual freedom (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Collectivism can be dangerous too (Score:3, Interesting)
Individualism allows the group to pursue its goals. Without the hard w
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I love all those things up til you get to Ayn Rand. She's a poor writer, a hateful polemicist, and a shoddy philosopher. I don't find it the least bit inconsistent that her vile bilge is inconsistent with my own philosophies, even if they overlap halfway.
If you can
Objectivism: comic-book reality (Score:3, Insightful)
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Like you, I have to admit to a experiential distaste for her adherents. I have found that th
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Compare and Contrast the Turner Diaries and Atlas Shrugged.
If you can complete this project without your brain melting, you get a free straight-jacket.
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Well, they didn't work for me anyway, on Ubuntu. I did go around installing things. Finally I found a repo that would let me install it; if I were booted into Linux right now I'd look it up and tell you what it was. Suffice to say that you can find binary packages and this is definitely the method I'd suggest for trying out cinelerra. I noodled around with the build for quite a while and fina
Re:If you don't have the time, don't do it (Score:5, Insightful)
You use software that you didn't pay for, in terms of support you deserve exactly what you paid for. If the authors happen to be kind enough to return your e-mails instead of snickering 'RTFM', that great, but a FOSS author is under no obligation to support anything. If he wants his project to succeed, he will have to support what he's written for at least some time, but nobody's gonna put his feet to the coals for dropping support for a project he no longer has time for.
Parent