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

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?

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.