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Jimmy Wales's Open Source Collaboration Tips
destinyland writes "In a new interview Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales acknowledges his debt to Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation and discusses his new open source search project. He applauds the way Open Source developers work around their ideological differences, acknowledges that he's an Ayn Rand objectivist who's skeptical of the wisdom of crowds, and blames Slashdot for his grandstanding comment that Wikipedia would bury Encyclopedia Brittanica within five years."
If you're actually looking for open source collaboration tips, take a look at Karl Fogel's (freely-available) book:
http://producingoss.com/html-chunk/index.html
My other car is first.
you should throw all your money at the stock market, because if you have any brains whatsoever you can get rich. You should certainly be able to predict better than those stupid crowds whether the stock will go up or down.
Maybe the problem is that wikipedia, as it is currently designed, doesn't tap into that wisdom as effectively as a market does.
[He] blames Slashdot for his grandstanding comment that Wikipedia would bury Encyclopedia Brittanica within five years.
Actually, according to Wikipedia, the number of years in which Wikipedia will bury Encyclopedia Brittanica has tripled in the last six months.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
What does Ayn Rand have to do with philosophy? Indeed. Whenever someone professes admiration for Ayn Rand, I can only assume that it is out of ignorance, a mere reading of her two fat novels without any training in real philosophy. I recently read Jeff Walker's The Ayn Rand Cult (Open Court, 1998) which, besides being a chronicle of how many lives her and her immediate followers wrecked, talks much about how the philosophy community--even scholars with ethical views similar to her own--reject her work as lacking in rigour, containing much inconsistency and back-peddling, and showing a lack of understanding of the earlier philosophers she cites (putting words into Kant's mouth, for example).
It doesn't reflect well on Jimbo at all to claim such a crackpot and madwoman as a role model. Besides, isn't part of Objectivism supposedly rejecting gurus? Why doesn't Jimbo just say he's an individualist, why bring up Rand at all?
You use software that you didn't pay for, in terms of support you deserve exactly what you paid for. If the authors happen to be kind enough to return your e-mails instead of snickering 'RTFM', that great, but a FOSS author is under no obligation to support anything. If he wants his project to succeed, he will have to support what he's written for at least some time, but nobody's gonna put his feet to the coals for dropping support for a project he no longer has time for.
My blog
There's a little bit more detail and context in the audio of the interview.
If you're one of those Reality-Denoying Looters who doesn't want to pay for a book, the gist is also in Michael Shermer's essay, The Unlikeliest Cult in History. Shermer's name and reputation might be familiar to folks who travel in Objectivist circles too.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
He doesn't blame Slashdot, he blames himself for writing something on Slashdot to rile up the Slashdotters.
Come on, summarizer! This is the guy from Wikipedia, who discusses the importance of distinguishing a channel from its content just a bit higher up in TFA, for crying out loud. Read the damn thing!
We are all free to engage in behavior which we find pleasing. Please don't call yours altruism when in fact, you derive pleasure from it. Few things could be more thoroughly greedy. It's like bragging about how humble you are.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
Atlas Shrugged is a melodramatic joke of a book with such a childish storyline that I'm surprised that anyone takes her "philosophy" seriously. As other posters have indicated, her "serious" philosophical work is regarded with derision by most in the field. Her so-called ethical system had been demolished by others more rigorous and of greater intellect (Kant, Hume, Hobbes, Kierkegaard) before she was even born.
Like you, I have to admit to a experiential distaste for her adherents. I have found that those espousing her philosophy are usually just selfish creatures trying to justify their own selfishness. Bleh...
- Oust your co-founder and start claiming that you are the sole founder. It's okay if your organization's own past press releases contradict what you are now saying. No one will notice!
- Claim that the majority of work is done by a group of people who actually don't really contribute that much.
I'm sure there's more.Free Hans!
Well, I am hostile to Rand because I read Atlas Shrugged.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
When in doubt, blame Slashdot. It's fun for the whole family.
You might be an Ayn Rand objectivist if:
You're a brilliant innovator. Really. You'd show us... but we're not worthy of benefiting from your genius.
You replaced your subscription of Penthouse with the Wall Street Journal and read it for the same purpose.
Whenever you visit a national park you lament all the sky scrapers that should have been built there instead.
You day dream about escaping to Galt's Gulch, even though the male\female ratio is something like 10:1. Hey, it worked for the Smurfs.
It takes you 20 minutes to explain to people the concept of "A thing is itself" and wonder why people think you are condescending.
is a "troll."
Advocate banning "trolls" whenever possible, especially when they threaten to expose malfeasance on the part of your worst employees.
Call one of your detractors a "disease" in your IRC channels, then deny you said it (even though it was logged) and create an entire "biography" on the person devoted solely to libeling them, in violation of publication laws and your own "standards" for biographical entries.
Suggest in your logged, publicly available email lists for the project that "lone wolves" should start filing dishonest "complaints" with the hosting ISP against a site critical of your behavior.
Take the money donated for "the project" and build a new house with it.
> They're building a storehouse of knowledge to make factual information available to everyone
Why would Rand care about something done for this nebulous "everyone", especially when no one pays for it?
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
When I was a young lad I was really into Ayn Rand for a long time and read all her books and all the non-fiction stuff. It was fun and interesting. I was a randroid, debated on usenet. blah blah.
Then I realized that there aren't all these super-human man-god objectivists that are being held down by the evil-evader looters. Really the world is a big soup of mediocrity, confusion, uncertainty and incompetence and everybody just tries the best they can. Even people who are genius architects are probably about average as track atheletes or at writing poetry. Thus the need to co-operate with other people who are good at different things and the need for humility, listening to people, etc.
Really Rand is a reflection more generally of Russian thought which is that everything is either perfect and godlike or low, despicable and corrupt. Look at the characters in the Brothers Karamozov for example. The real world is a lot more ambiguous.
Altruism is doing something that benefits other people when you only indirectly benefit from it. That describes 90% of Wikipedia contributions. Personal pleasure doesn't even enter into it, and can't, because unless you're under coercion you are always doing things for some sort of personal pleasure. Actually even if you're under coercion it's usually the pleasure of a lack of pain.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
The ultimate long term prediction of the stock market is how much profits the company will make. However, you can also bet on the short term, which is whether the stock will go up or down.
Note that you can play the prediction markets the same way, betting on the price of the shares (selling prior to the date of the election/game etc)
In any case, if it makes it easier to see the point, just talk about prediction markets. You are left with one of two logical conclusions: 1) the crowd is remarkably accurate and predicting, or 2) you are an idiot to not put a bunch of money into them.
Rather, the "exact oppposite" would be if he tried to compel others to build Wikipedia against their own wishes and interests. Or seek legal sanction against those who would not build it for him. Or to manipulative the weight of others to bear against some other encyclopedia group.
And she doesn't condemn altruism, she posits that there's no such thing as 'altruism' -- people do things because those things are in their interest to do, whether pragmatic or abstract. What she condemns is the elevation of a slavery/behavior compulsion ethic deceptively mislabeled as 'altruism' to a position of unchallengeable supremacy in an individual's decision-making process.
I know of no successful open source software projects run that way. On all the successful open source projects only few are granted write access to cvs/svn and most open source projects are run by one or two very opinionated people who do not accomodate others on a whim. In most cases, people finding a problem submit a patch and onte of the trusted few will apply it. In many cases, the patch will not be applied directly, but will be rewritten to achieve the desired effect better.
Sure people can take all the code and fork the project, but that is very different to having control over the document. You very seldom get wikipeia-style edit wars in OSS code bases because "the boss" does not tolerate it. Abuse the privaledge of write access and you lose it.
To draw a parallels between Wikipedia (which is uncontrolled) and Open Source (which is controlled) just does Open Source a disservice. There's enough anti-Open Source FUD out there and we don't need people thinking that any dummy with a chip on their shoulder can modifyt open source.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It seems like Wales is on a project creation frenzy, it seems like every month theres yet another project launched from Wales and Beesley. Actually I exaggerate but the previous big announcement http://campaigns.wikia.com/ seems to be pretty inactive now. I fear the same will happen for the new search engine. Does jimbo have the time to dedicate to making this happen, or is it vapor-ware?
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
Collectivism allows the individual to persue his goals. Without the support of others, people are very limited in what they can do. Without collectivism, we would each be at the mercy of the strong and amoral, as well as nature. There's an old African proverb that peaks to the reciprocal nature of individual freedom and social responsibility: Only free individuals can make a strong tribe. Only a strong tribe can make free individuals.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
> Is that what I was doing on Wikipedia? I thought that I was engaging in a hobby I enjoy, which is of benefit to me.
:-)
Weird. Normal people rationalize away their greed and selfishness. I never realized that Rand's followers rationalized altrusim, instead...
I'm not complaining, mind you--I'd much rather you were altrusitic than some greedy asshole--but I confess that the notion of rationalizing it seems odd to me. You usually only rationalize bad things
Another quote: Pure democracy is kind of like three wolves and two chickens voting on what to have for dinner.
Most of us can agree that it is proper and even critical role of government to secure basic freedom. However, to move from securing basic freedom to redistributing assets, excessively controlling consumer choice, etc is a very dangerous and slippery slope. You totally ignore that there are many collectivist organizations in 20th century that have done great harm to the individual (e.g., Naziism, Communist Russia, Communist China, etc). There is no guarantee that a simple majority vote, even an overwhelming ones, delivers justice or freedom.
You'd be surprised, but neuroscience is disproving Rand's pseudophilosophy:_ of_altr.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/23/neuroscience
If you love science, reasoning, don't hate yourself, like trading the things that you create for things of value created by others, and generally find that your own happiness is important to you, it's likely that you'll love Ayn Rand's writings.
...
I love all those things up til you get to Ayn Rand. She's a poor writer, a hateful polemicist, and a shoddy philosopher. I don't find it the least bit inconsistent that her vile bilge is inconsistent with my own philosophies, even if they overlap halfway.
If you can't stand logical thought, think that every blade of grass on earth is more important than your own life, want a handout from the government, and think that all that counts is serving others, well, there's always Jesus or Karl Marx for you
Well hey, congratulations on your, uh, rational analysis.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
If it weren't for people who help other people, I probably would be in a much worse place than I am in right now. Several of my teachers have said that I am the smartest person they have ever known, and I'm not even making this up. But I have Asperger's Syndrome and it has lead to me being almost entirely emotionally inept. Things like this are the standard for smart people--one switch on, one switch off. Supporters of individual fanaticism like the majority of the Objectivist movement is predicated on the belief in a superman who is perfect everywhere and the false dichotomy between "the projection of an ideal man" and a man whose main goal is leeching off of society. Thinking in ones and zeroes may work when programming circuits but that's not how it works with people. There is no "ideal man" and most of those whom the Randian society sees as leeches aren't. Belief in the "ideal man" is just as illogical as belief in the Second Coming, but I can forgive the latter as it was invented in the Roman society when the nature of reality was not as well-defined as it was in the twentieth century when Rand lived.
Objectivism may be based off of logical reasoning from assumed premises, but all the reasoning in the world is for naught when it's based on false principles. The majority of Objectivists tend to ignore their weaknesses, considering that if they acknowledged both their weaknesses and Objectivism then they'd have to admit that they are a leech on society. Which leads to them considering those who are strong in their weaknesses as the leeches on society. This leads to the false belief in "I should only care about myself" and the delusions Objectivists get of being the intellectual equivalent of Superman. In other words, belief in Objectivist reality is like believing in Superman reality. Superman may make for a decent story but all-powerful people like Superman only exist in the comic books. No, wait, Superman used his powers to help people who obviously don't deserve to be helped because otherwise they'd be able to fly away from certain death themselves. And then there's Kryptonite which requires other people to oh my god help him. No wait, the Objectivist hero barely even makes a good story(only insomuch as Chuck Norris facts make a good story) considering that most Superman stories are chock full of kryptonite because of how boring and unrealistic somebody with absolutely no weaknesses is.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
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