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>Wikipedia improved at a much faster rate, because it had an active community of volunteer contributors who were attracted to its decentralized, community-gover

>Wikipedia improved at a much faster rate, because it had an active community of volunteer contributors who were attracted to its decentralized, community-governed ethos. Does being open contribution warrant the use of the word "decentralised"? as far as I can tell it's still a huge success story from a centralisation perspective.

TuringTest 5y ago
The biggest selling point of Wikipedia at its growth phase was that the content wasn't tied to a single central service, anyone could take it and use it for any other purpose - creating competing services, bundling it with commercial products, etc. The website where the efforts were finally consolidated was a central place, but it could very well have been developed as a network of nodes dedicated to different aspects of the explanation of areas of knowledge; the license allowed that. And the growth was initially not coordinated from a central place, an anarchic community began working on different areas and only later began coordinating by building top level behavior policies (as intended).
- spiralx 5y ago
  > The website where the efforts were finally consolidated was a central place, but it could very well have been developed as a network of nodes dedicated to different aspects of the explanation of areas of knowledge; the license allowed that. And the growth was initially not coordinated from a central place, an anarchic community began working on different areas and only later began coordinating by building top level behavior policies (as intended). This is a remarkable framing that skirts around the fact that Wikipedia started as a single project and website and remains a single project and website today. Neither crowdsourcing content nor having a permissive license require or even imply decentralisation of any kind.
  - TuringTest 5y ago
    > Neither crowdsourcing content nor having a permissive license require or even imply decentralisation of any kind. That's only true if you don't consider "crowdsourcing" and "open sourcing" as forms of decentralization on themselves. A project based on those foundations will necessarily have a less centralised and controlling leadership than one based on the concept of ownership and copy rights, because it cannot prevent decisions being made by multiple actors and not just the governing board.
    - spiralx 5y ago
      The Wikimedia Foundation is literally run by a governing board lol, and if I start a project on Kickstarter I still have complete control and ownership of my project. Saying that "having multiple contributors" or "permissive licensing" is decentralisation is just silly.

TuringTest 5y ago

The biggest selling point of Wikipedia at its growth phase was that the content wasn't tied to a single central service, anyone could take it and use it for any other purpose - creating competing services, bundling it with commercial products, etc. The website where the efforts were finally consolidated was a central place, but it could very well have been developed as a network of nodes dedicated to different aspects of the explanation of areas of knowledge; the license allowed that. And the growth was initially not coordinated from a central place, an anarchic community began working on different areas and only later began coordinating by building top level behavior policies (as intended).

spiralx 5y ago
> The website where the efforts were finally consolidated was a central place, but it could very well have been developed as a network of nodes dedicated to different aspects of the explanation of areas of knowledge; the license allowed that. And the growth was initially not coordinated from a central place, an anarchic community began working on different areas and only later began coordinating by building top level behavior policies (as intended). This is a remarkable framing that skirts around the fact that Wikipedia started as a single project and website and remains a single project and website today. Neither crowdsourcing content nor having a permissive license require or even imply decentralisation of any kind.
- TuringTest 5y ago
  > Neither crowdsourcing content nor having a permissive license require or even imply decentralisation of any kind. That's only true if you don't consider "crowdsourcing" and "open sourcing" as forms of decentralization on themselves. A project based on those foundations will necessarily have a less centralised and controlling leadership than one based on the concept of ownership and copy rights, because it cannot prevent decisions being made by multiple actors and not just the governing board.
  - spiralx 5y ago
    The Wikimedia Foundation is literally run by a governing board lol, and if I start a project on Kickstarter I still have complete control and ownership of my project. Saying that "having multiple contributors" or "permissive licensing" is decentralisation is just silly.