On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 11:31 PM, Neil Kandalgaonkar <ne...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > Let's imagine you wanted to start a rival to Wikipedia. Assume that you > are motivated by money, and that venture capitalists promise you can be > paid gazillions of dollars if you can do one, or many, of the following: > > 1 - Become a more attractive home to the WP editors. Get them to work on > your content. > > 2 - Take the free content from WP, and use it in this new system. But > make it much better, in a way Wikipedia can't match. > > 3 - Attract even more readers, or perhaps a niche group of > super-passionate readers that you can use to build a new community.
I'll start off by saying that I have no idea how anyone would do it, realistically. I'm pretty sure it's possible, but I think a big reason that it hasn't happened yet is because the economics of creating a competitor are really difficult. There are very few markets that Microsoft completely gave up in (especially markets in which they've had success), but yet that's exactly what they did with Encarta. Good luck getting VC money to take on a market that Microsoft abandons. ;-) I suspect if I had to choose, though, I'd go with #2. I'd probably bootstrap by creating tools *for* Wikipedia editors rather than trying right off the bat to create a wholly separate site. For example, it'd probably be possible to scrape our data to create a really fantastic citation database, which then could be used to build tools that make creating citations much easier. The goal would be to make it easier for editors to keep *my* database up-to-date, and push a copy to Wikipedia, rather than having to constantly suck things out of Wikipedia. That's such a small part of the overall editing problem that I'm not sure how I'd bootstrap that into something much larger (and in the case of a citation database, it wouldn't be necessary for Wikipedia to lose in order to have a modest ad-supported business). As to the implied question, I think we need to figure out ways of making things like this easier for third parties to tackle. If we can make it easier for third parties to create tools for editing Wikipedia (regardless of their motivations), we'll probably accidentally make it easier for us to make it easier to edit Wikipedia. Rob _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
