Jimmy Wales's Open Source Collaboration Tips

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."

Article and title don't match...

[jrockway (229604)]

If you're actually looking for open source collaboration tips, take a look at Karl Fogel's (freely-available) book:

http://producingoss.com/html-chunk/index.html [producingoss.com]

OSS idealogical differences... what a crock!

[EmbeddedJanitor (597831)]

This paints a picture of most open source projects being run like Wikipedia is, in an "anyone can edit" mode. What crap.

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.

If you don't believe in the wisdom of crowds

[catbutt (469582)]

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.

Maybe the problem is that wikipedia, as it is currently designed, doesn't tap into that wisdom as effectively as a market does.

Re:

[kfg (145172)]

. . .you should throw all your money at the stock market

Dude, that's what the crowd does.

KFG

Re:If you don't believe in the wisdom of crowds

[WolfWithoutAClause (162946)]

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.

Re:

[catbutt (469582)]

Huh?

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.

Yeah, well

[User 956 (568564)]

[He] blames Slashdot for his grandstanding comment that Wikipedia would bury Encyclopedia Brittanica within five years.

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

[Trillan (597339)]

+{{fact}} :)

Audio version of the interview

[destinyland (578448)]

There's a little bit more detail and context in the audio of the interview [rusiriusradio.com].

No, he does not blame Slashdot.

[by Anonymous Coward]

He doesn't blame Slashdot, he blames himself for writing something on Slashdot to rile up the Slashdotters.

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

[andy314159pi (787550)]

that he's an Ayn Rand objectivist who's skeptical of the wisdom of crowds

Kill the wise one!

Two more

[Apotsy (84148)]

Here's a couple you won't see mentioned:

• 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

[Moryath (553296)]

is a "troll."

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.

Do what I do

[cheezfreek (517446)]

When in doubt, blame Slashdot. It's fun for the whole family.

The secret to not being a lame-o Objectivist.

[TheNarrator (200498)]

When I was a young lad I was really into Ayn Rand for a long time and read all her books and all the non-fiction stuff. It was fun and interesting. I was a randroid, debated on usenet. blah blah.

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.

Re:Ayn Rand? The fan dancer?

[CRCulver (715279)]

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?

Re:

[nuzak (959558)]

If you're one of those Reality-Denoying Looters who doesn't want to pay for a book, the gist is also in Michael Shermer's essay, The Unlikeliest Cult in History [2think.org]. Shermer's name and reputation might be familiar to folks who travel in Objectivist circles too.

Re:Ayn Rand? The fan dancer?

[CaffeineAddict2001 (518485)]

You might be an Ayn Rand objectivist if:

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.

Re:

[haakondahl (893488)]

Helping each other for no reason? Is that what I was doing on Wikipedia? I thought that I was engaging in a hobby I enjoy, which is of benefit to me. I thought I was maintaining a system which I find useful, which is of benefit to me. I thought I was testing my own knowledge and plagia^H^H^H^H^Hresearch skill against others who comment in the same areas; all of which benefits me.

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?

[WilliamSChips (793741)]

Altruism is doing something that benefits other people when you only indirectly benefit from it. That describes 90% of Wikipedia contributions. Personal pleasure doesn't even enter into it, and can't, because unless you're under coercion you are always doing things for some sort of personal pleasure. Actually even if you're under coercion it's usually the pleasure of a lack of pain.

Re:

[nuzak (959558)]

> They're building a storehouse of knowledge to make factual information available to everyone

Why would Rand care about something done for this nebulous "everyone", especially when no one pays for it?

Re:

[Knuckles (8964)]

Well, I am hostile to Rand because I read Atlas Shrugged.

Only collectivism creates individual freedom

[spun (1352)]

Collectivism allows the individual to persue his goals. Without the support of others, people are very limited in what they can do. Without collectivism, we would each be at the mercy of the strong and amoral, as well as nature. There's an old African proverb that peaks to the reciprocal nature of individual freedom and social responsibility: Only free individuals can make a strong tribe. Only a strong tribe can make free individuals.

Re:

[udderly (890305)]

Atlas Shrugged is a melodramatic joke of a book with such a childish storyline that I'm surprised that anyone takes her "philosophy" seriously. As other posters have indicated, her "serious" philosophical work is regarded with derision by most in the field. Her so-called ethical system had been demolished by others more rigorous and of greater intellect (Kant, Hume, Hobbes, Kierkegaard) before she was even born.

Like you, I have to admit to a experiential distaste for her adherents. I have found that th

Re:If you don't have the time, don't do it

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

I

f you don't have the time and the resources to fully support what you put on the internet, don't do it, or plan on a huge legal bill. You will be sued for negligence. You will lose your job. You're obligated to support what you put on the internet, whether or not the GPL says "no warranty".

Obligated by whom? If Linus and his band of merry kernel hackers got together and said "Ok, we've all had enough of Linux. Time to move on!", except to fulfill 3rd-party contractural obligations (i.e., Linus works for OSDL, Alan Cox for Red Hat, etc.), what would prevent them from doing so? Nothing!

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.