Dawn of the Geeks

The Register has a run a story on the failings of Wikipedia.

Choice quote

Traditionally, Wikipedia supporters have responded to criticism in one of several ways. The commonest is: If you don’t like an entry, you can fix it yourself. Which is rather like going to a restaurant for a date, being served terrible food, and then being told by the waiter where to find the kitchen. But you didn’t come out to cook a meal - you could have done that at home! No matter, roll up your sleeves.

This isn’t a wikipedia problem. It’s an open source problem. Nobody wants to take responsibility for the crap they write. It’s everyone who complains responsibility to fix it. In the closed source world in which I work when you write code, if there’s a bug, you get a e-mail telling you what the bug is and that you need to fix it. In Open Source there’s a complete lack of responsibility. Or maybe it’s just the “help” that wants to push this misguided ideology.

Its philosophical approach deters subjective judgements about quality, and its political mindset deters outside experts from helping.

The Closed Source mindset is “throw money at it.” The Open Source mindset is “throw people at it.” Throwing money at a problem results in paying skilled people to do the job. It’s throwing people at the problem but by giving them a real incentive to do it right. The Open Source model is just out looking for any idiot that can print text on a screen. I’m sorry but a million idiots are not going to build a spaceship any more than throwing a million tons of iron into an oven is going to turn out gold.

The amount of work does not produce quality. It’s the quality of the work. The quality of the individual determines the quality of the product. Not the quantity of individiuals. This is why there’s an abundance of open source projects and not so surprisingly, the really good ones have serious financial backing with paid professionals working on them.