Neil Kandalgaonkar (2010-12-29 21:40): > On 12/29/10 4:05 AM, Bryan Tong Minh wrote: >> On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Maciej Jaros<e...@wp.pl> wrote: >>> If one would have a budget of gazillions of dollars then it would be >>> quite easy ;-). The problem is - what would be the point of investing >>> such money if you wouldn't get it back from this investment? >>> >> While money can fix a lot of things, I don't think the current >> bottleneck is money. > I apologize for sending this discussion in a direction I hadn't > intended. The money was purely to imply that you had to be motivated, > not that you had a vast budget. > > Let me be more explicit. The "innovator's dilemma" problem, already > referred to in this discussion, occurs because the successful innovator > can't see past the goal of defending their earlier successes, and > working with their existing assets. > > The thought experiment of working for a competitor was meant to suggest > this: what would you do if you wanted to make Wikipedia's earlier > successes *obsolete*? The point is to then try to look at some of our > greatest assets and see if, in the current environment, they could be > potential liabilities.
My original point was that the community is the power of WMF sites and that this alone is IMHO hard to beat. To be more exact this is a community that I believe is loyal and needs to trust the corporation/founder/foundation behind the site (I've seen a community driven project fall after loosing this trust). > And the followup question was "if a competitor can do this, why don't WE > do this?" We don't because it would probably be more reasonable for our competitor to do something completely different to gather different community or he would have to make a gigantic effort to steal current community (both in technical and PR terms). I think the effort would simply be inefficient. In any case - the next killer functionality (if that's what you're asking) is well known and already mentioned - WYSIWYG. WYSIWYG that makes edits easy for new users and make them not break existing markup. And yes I believe present markup needs to be preserved. Not because it's good, it's because it is well know to many current users. It's because community is accustomed with it. Loosing users after changing markup drastically would certainly not be a good idea. You have to remember how many disappointment brought a simple change of default skin. Something that can be changed back in 3 clicks. And so new markup (if such would be used) would have to at least be parseable back to wikitext. Regards, Nux. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
