> "Replacing Wikipedia" strikes me as one of the least essential ideas on making the web better these days, but "developing an alternative news/information thing that anyone can work on and edit" seems cool? Something between the very authoritative "Wikipedia" and the mostly "single-creator" things like githubs awesome lists, rentry's and so forth?
I read a comment here on HN recently, wish I could find it now (I think it was in one of the threads on the 'missing datatype (graphs)'). The gist was that we do large things pretty well: Operating Systems, standard libraries, etc and small things pretty well: single header file libs, specific open source projects, etc, but medium size things are missing. This seems to be the same kind of thing: you have enough complexity that coordination is hard(tm) but you don't have enough scale to build up an institutional inertia to overcome the bus-factor-of-one-ness that--- uhhh
What I'm trying to say is that the support system around that project, like if you have a medium sized project, its going to have individual experts for the parts that make it up, but they're all single points of failure.
If I had more time I would have written a shorter more coherent comment.
It's known as the Valley of Death syndrome. [♪][♫][ꜘ]
Especially common in the DoD where they're good at funding enormous numbers of SBIRs/STTRs, yet they never go anywhere, because all large money contracts are guaranteed to be vacuumed up by Lockheed / Raytheon / Northrup Grumman / Boeing / General Dynamics / Teledyne Brown / Honeywell / ect...
And in most cases (in my opinion, not legally binding), they purposely, slowly build cripple-ware with planned obsolescence that results in equipment that's vestigial before it launches and immediately needs 'upgrade' contracts.
I read a comment here on HN recently, wish I could find it now (I think it was in one of the threads on the 'missing datatype (graphs)'). The gist was that we do large things pretty well: Operating Systems, standard libraries, etc and small things pretty well: single header file libs, specific open source projects, etc, but medium size things are missing. This seems to be the same kind of thing: you have enough complexity that coordination is hard(tm) but you don't have enough scale to build up an institutional inertia to overcome the bus-factor-of-one-ness that--- uhhh
What I'm trying to say is that the support system around that project, like if you have a medium sized project, its going to have individual experts for the parts that make it up, but they're all single points of failure.
If I had more time I would have written a shorter more coherent comment.