RE: Experimental Wiki at midrange.com

Mike Wills,
According to the Wall Street Journal, the issues you describe (see bottom of
message) have already been addressed by the new site wikicities.com, created
by the wikipedia people.  The Wall Street Journal article (cited below)
discusses how the things you seek are already at wikicities.com.

In any event, a dedicated band of volunteers, willing to devote thousands of
hours in an unpaid labor of love, is needed to make a success of projects of
this size and scope.  Time will reveal whether David's group of volunteers
outperform those at wikipedia.org and wikicities.com.

I foresee a lot of duplicated effort, however, and that is regrettable.

EricL
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  http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB111196673261990485,00.html

copyright Wall Street Journal 2005
>From Wikipedia's Creator,
A New Site for Anyone, Anything

By VAUHINI VARA
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE
March 28, 2005; Page B1

Four years ago, Jimmy Wales launched a free online encyclopedia that anyone
could edit. Now, Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites on the Web, and
Mr. Wales is building on its success with a new venture. This time, he
intends to make a buck.

Mr. Wales's closely held company Wikia Inc. has begun promoting its first
for-profit endeavor, an ad-supported site called Wikicities.com that is
based on the concept behind Wikipedia. Through Wikicities, groups of Web
users can create their own free Web sites and fill them with, well, nearly
anything. Among the topics being discussed on the nascent site: Macintosh
computers, college hockey and real-world cities like Los Angeles, Beijing
and Calgary.

Any visitor can easily change a wiki's appearance or the information it
contains using tools included on the site. Later, if another user disagrees
with a change, he can cancel it just as easily with the click of a mouse.
Changes appear instantly and are tracked in a "history" tab on the page.
Each topic is overseen by an administrator, who has the power to block users
who have records of contributing little more than vandalism. Still, for the
most part, democracy rules.

To the uninitiated, that free-for-all approach to editing sounds like a
recipe for chaos. But it's a model that has made Mr. Wales's better-known
project, Wikipedia, one of the most-visited sites on the Web. In the past
year, traffic to Wikipedia has doubled to 5.3 million unique visitors in
February, topping such well-known destinations as the Drudge Report,
Yellowpages.com and Craigslist.org, according to research firm ComScore
Networks Inc.

Wikipedia now has more than 1.3 million articles in several languages and is
constantly updated by its visitors, from addicts who spend hours a day
adding pages to casual Web surfers who correct spelling errors, then move
on.

[....]

Over the past four years, Wikipedia's high traffic and strong community of
die-hard users has helped it gain a reputation for being surprisingly
accurate. Most sites on Wikicities, however, are still relatively sparse and
seem to be edited by just a few people. The Spanish-language "Medicine" wiki
is filled with information, but the English-language version is nearly
empty. It features a main page with categories like "anatomy," but clicking
on a link to any of those categories brings up a message, "You've followed a
link to a page that doesn't exist yet." Another wiki, used by fans of the
Mozilla Foundation, which makes the Firefox Web browser, recently saw a
surge of vandalism after being linked to from another site. On Wikipedia,
meanwhile, many popular entries are updated every few seconds, and damage is
often corrected within a matter of minutes. Mr. Wales says he expects
Wikicities to become more robust as traffic grows.

There are other ways in which Wikicities differs from Wikipedia. Wikicities
intends to make money with ads from Google Inc.'s AdSense program -- in
which Web sites get paid to run ads from Google's network of advertisers.
The move is a radical departure from Wikipedia's staunch noncommercialism.
Wikicities thrives on minute details, like the specifications of each
Macintosh operating system at mac.wikicities.com, while the Wikipedia
community uses a voting process to delete pages that it deems trivial.

Wikicities also throws one of Wikipedia's main tenets to the wind. Because
Wikipedia is a reference guide, its users adhere to a strict policy of
neutrality: Entries should fairly represent all sides of an issue. With
Wikicities, no such rule exists. A wiki devoted to Ashlee Simpson, for
example, cheerfully solicits music reviews from the pop singer's fans, while
the "Quit Smoking" wiki chastises on its main page: "Smoking is a bad
problem. There is absolutely no point in doing it."

"Wikicities is not trying to be an encyclopedia," says Thomas Whaples, a
college student and frequent Wikipedia user. "It's trying to be a place
where people collaborate."

One of Wikicities' most prolific users is Laurence Parry, a 22-year-old
computer programmer in Caterham, England, who co-founded a wiki dedicated to
a computer-game series called Creatures and now spends up to several hours a
day updating the site. Before the Creatures wiki existed, fans of the game
swapped tips in scattered online forums.

Then Mr. Parry and his friend heard of Wikicities. The Creatures wiki has
become one of the most robust sections of Wikicities, featuring the history
of the series, summaries of each game and links to outside Web sites where
users post their own updates for the games. "I mean, I don't know everything
about Creatures," says Mr. Parry. "But I've learned an awful lot over the
past three months."

Elsewhere on Wikicities, users are writing collaborative Spanish-language
novels, drawing family trees for characters from the "Star Wars" movies and
adding to a database of facial-cleansing products.

Wikia's Mr. Wales says he hopes to use the money raised by Wikicities to
support his nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation Inc., which funds Wikipedia and
other smaller projects, like a dictionary that anyone can edit called
Wiktionary. So far, Wikimedia's expenses have been covered through
fund-raising drives and out-of-pocket support from Mr. Wales. But
Wikipedia's growth has brought rising expenses. In the early days of the
site, upkeep cost about $20,000 a quarter. For the first quarter of 2005,
Mr. Wales expects that number to reach $125,000. "We have big, crazy goals
of giving a free encyclopedia to everyone in the world," he says. "That's
going to take money."

So far, ad revenue on Wikicities has just barely been trickling in. "It's so
close to zero that it's not worth mentioning," Mr. Wales says. But traffic
is growing, and the site's founders are trying to attract funding from
venture-capital firms.

Wikicities users say they tolerate ads in exchange for free real estate on
the Web, and Internet-watchers say it makes sense. "They're giving something
to you and your community of fellow believers, so it seems reasonable that
it has tastefully handled advertising," says David Weinberger, a research
fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
"If it keeps ads out of Wikipedia, then I like it."


+++++++++++++++++++++

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-nontech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-nontech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Mike Wills
Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 2:15 PM
To: Non-Technical Discussion about the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: Experimental Wiki at midrange.com


I disagree. You are dealing with what I consider a generic source for
information. Do they give code examples on how to avoid using MOVE in /free
code? Do they explain the nitty-gritty on using OS/400 APIs in RPG? I think
we can focus more on the details in the Wiki than Wikipedia can. Besides,
Wikipedia stuff is scattered all over the site, here everything is iSeries.