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."

Comments

Yeah, well

[User 956]

[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.

Re:Ayn Rand? The fan dancer?

[CRCulver]

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?

Re:If you don't have the time, don't do it

[morgan_greywolf]

I

f you don't have the time and the resources to fully support what you put on the internet, don't do it, or plan on a huge legal bill. You will be sued for negligence. You will lose your job. You're obligated to support what you put on the internet, whether or not the GPL says "no warranty".

Obligated by whom? If Linus and his band of merry kernel hackers got together and said "Ok, we've all had enough of Linux. Time to move on!", except to fulfill 3rd-party contractural obligations (i.e., Linus works for OSDL, Alan Cox for Red Hat, etc.), what would prevent them from doing so? Nothing!

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.

Audio version of the interview

[destinyland]

There's a little bit more detail and context in the audio of the interview.

Crowds always make good decisions

[andy314159pi]

that he's an Ayn Rand objectivist who's skeptical of the wisdom of crowds

Kill the wise one!

Two more

[Apotsy]

Here's a couple you won't see mentioned:

• 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.

Claim that anyone who isn't in the groupthink

[Moryath]

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.

Re:Ayn Rand? The fan dancer?

[WilliamSChips]

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.