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."

If you don't believe in the wisdom of crowds

[catbutt]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

Re:Ayn Rand? The fan dancer?

[haakondahl]

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 pleasure from it. Few things could be more thoroughly greedy. It's like bragging about how humble you are.

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

[WolfWithoutAClause]

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

[catbutt]

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.

The secret to not being a lame-o Objectivist.

[TheNarrator]

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:Stock market vs. betting parlor

[catbutt]

The ultimate long term prediction of the stock market is how much profits the company will make. However, you can also bet on the short term, which is whether the stock will go up or down.

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 accurate and predicting, or 2) you are an idiot to not put a bunch of money into them.

Re:Ayn Rand? The fan dancer?

[EricTheGreen]

Even then, if Jimbo is a follower of Rand, he's done about the exact opposite of her views.

Rand would look at Wikipedia and shudder. Wikipedia is the embodiment of altruism. People helping people for reasons other than to further their own status ... sickening.

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" would be if he tried to compel others to build Wikipedia against their own wishes and interests. Or seek legal sanction against those who would not build it for him. Or to manipulative the weight of others to bear against some other encyclopedia group.

And she doesn't condemn altruism, she posits that there's no such thing as 'altruism' -- people do things because those things are in their interest to do, whether pragmatic or abstract. What she condemns is the elevation of a slavery/behavior compulsion ethic deceptively mislabeled as 'altruism' to a position of unchallengeable supremacy in an individual's decision-making process.

OSS idealogical differences... what a crock!

[EmbeddedJanitor]

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.

Only collectivism creates individual freedom

[spun]

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.

Rationalization

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

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 :-)

Objectivism: comic-book reality

[WilliamSChips]

If it weren't for people who help other people, I probably would be in a much worse place than I am in right now. Several of my teachers have said that I am the smartest person they have ever known, and I'm not even making this up. But I have Asperger's Syndrome and it has lead to me being almost entirely emotionally inept. Things like this are the standard for smart people--one switch on, one switch off. Supporters of individual fanaticism like the majority of the Objectivist movement is predicated on the belief in a superman who is perfect everywhere and the false dichotomy between "the projection of an ideal man" and a man whose main goal is leeching off of society. Thinking in ones and zeroes may work when programming circuits but that's not how it works with people. There is no "ideal man" and most of those whom the Randian society sees as leeches aren't. Belief in the "ideal man" is just as illogical as belief in the Second Coming, but I can forgive the latter as it was invented in the Roman society when the nature of reality was not as well-defined as it was in the twentieth century when Rand lived.
Objectivism may be based off of logical reasoning from assumed premises, but all the reasoning in the world is for naught when it's based on false principles. The majority of Objectivists tend to ignore their weaknesses, considering that if they acknowledged both their weaknesses and Objectivism then they'd have to admit that they are a leech on society. Which leads to them considering those who are strong in their weaknesses as the leeches on society. This leads to the false belief in "I should only care about myself" and the delusions Objectivists get of being the intellectual equivalent of Superman. In other words, belief in Objectivist reality is like believing in Superman reality. Superman may make for a decent story but all-powerful people like Superman only exist in the comic books. No, wait, Superman used his powers to help people who obviously don't deserve to be helped because otherwise they'd be able to fly away from certain death themselves. And then there's Kryptonite which requires other people to oh my god help him. No wait, the Objectivist hero barely even makes a good story(only insomuch as Chuck Norris facts make a good story) considering that most Superman stories are chock full of kryptonite because of how boring and unrealistic somebody with absolutely no weaknesses is.