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The future of Linux: what it means for Wikipedia (apc)The future of Linux: what it means for Wikipedia (apc)Posted Jan 31, 2008 18:40 UTC (Thu) by einstein (subscriber, #2052)Parent article: The future of Linux: what it means for Wikipedia (apc)
The comparison to wikipedia seems seriously flawed to me. Are you really taking the position that any random bozo can shovel random crap into the linux kernel in drive-by fashion? That would be a propaganda coup for the anti-linux crowd, for sure. Fortunately, the linux development process doesn't work anything like that.
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The future of Linux: what it means for Wikipedia (apc) Posted Jan 31, 2008 19:01 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] I agree. Anyone can send their contributions to linux, but it has to go through several filters before Linus will add it to his "official" tree. This is what is missing in Wikipedia. It is remarkable that it has done as well as it has; a year or so ago I found Wikipedia a superior resource to most traditional references, but now I find random crap in pretty much any article I see there. (It is still a superior resource, provided you are able to filter out the crap and willing to double-check every fact you need.) Someone could try starting a "wikilinux" -- a centralised source tree repository that anyone can contribute to or modify, with similar minimal safeguards as Wikipedia -- but it probably wouldn't even build, much less work for most people. May be an interesting experiment though.
The future of Linux: what it means for Wikipedia (apc) Posted Jan 31, 2008 21:46 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] Also, the mechanical learning curve for making Wikipedia contributions (irrespective of domain knowledge of the topic being edited) is trivial compared to that of doing kernel work. Of course, one could always whine for more introductory material for Linux: waaah!
The future of Linux: what it means for Wikipedia (apc) Posted Feb 8, 2008 17:20 UTC (Fri) by kingdon (subscriber, #4526) [Link] My experience with Wikipedia is somewhat similar although I guess a bit more positive. You can find problematic stuff there (and cleaning it up is one of the hobbies of the dedicated wikipedian), but for me the amazing (and surprising) thing is that Wikipedia works as well as it does. Oh, and with policies, blocks, reverts, page protection, etc, it isn't quite as anarchic as it appears (although I suppose that is one of those "glass half empty or half full" things). As for "wikilinux", there's forkolator and a long time ago Ward Cunningham had some kind of wiki which let you edit perl code on wiki pages (although I'm not sure whether/where this was published). And of course there is fitnesse where people (not necessarily the whole world) edit acceptance tests (sort of a kind of code) via a wiki. But all of these are very much embryonic in terms of whether there is a a workable concept lurking here.
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