On Sep 18, 2008, at 6:23 PM, Stefan Merten wrote:
Yesterday alejo duque wrote:
if you compare backgrounds and the generational gap between FLOSS
developers and wikipedia editors you will get a clear reason for why
such difference...
Can you give more details in what you are thinking about?
certainly i might be speaking through the layers of prejudices i live in,
but i think that many powerful or "super editors" in wikipedia are people
who spent their life doing on traditional working enviroments and
conventions then sort of retired and for a lucky change found wikipedia as
a new job where clearly they could be experts on some areas, but
unfirtunately many try their competence in some where they just can't... i
tend to believe that i was arguing with the ex-librarian of my high school
in colombia, trying to explain that a liveCD was not a music CD, that i was
never going to sell thousands of copies as they wanted so to allow a
wikipedia entry..., that the project i was presenting was far from
commercial and that it needed a community to be built and that it was
already functional (just boot from your CD!), one of them claimed that it
was a minor linux distro. hes reading of the word minor i dont want to loose
time commenting... but why is it that a minor linux distro can't have a page
there? ..such comment just aligns with the other editor thinking of it in
line of being a CD of famous artist...the project was and is targeted for
immigrants, how many they think can really get to the point of downloading
and using a liveCD? thats already a big task and the steps for doing such
thing include youtube screencasts for changing bios settings... so far a
couple of hundred clicked on the download link in softpedia, phps when the
counter gets to the thousand i can get back to the wikipedia court
room..haha, yes, 519 is not many but is really not about the number is more
about expressing and idea and see if it gets to grow almost with no big
effort, just with love and few drops of water on the hot days (wiki page
here, screencast there, etc..)
they read the entry as "self" promotion and they where right, what they
didnt understood was that is it was a about the self promotion of a
community of immigrants.
so, "young" generations of computer coders in the floss arena are already
immersed in forks and branches, wikipedia will have to be revised in terms
of the software, that will allow such things.. git based wiki. that will
from the "firmware" get rid of all non sensical dicussions on every an each
page.. there might still be a task for censorship but thats another story.
i refrain on using this post to send links about the particular project i
use as example, cause this thread is not about it.
im sure also im not so clear on depicting the maind frame of the wikipedia
editor vrs the floss developer but i leave up there at least my vague
impression.
/a
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