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Comment by rokhayakebe | Hacker News Reader

Rather than just complaining about Wikipedia, I would love to see 2 smart guys in a garage create a competitor.

It's trivially easy for two smart guys in a garage to create a competitor.

It's difficult to persuade hundreds of thousands of people outside said garage to write the actual content.

I think most people would understand "create a competitor" to entail more than the strawman of mere implementation you seem to be taking it to mean.

The point is that the main problem can't be solved at the two-guys-in-a-garage level.

Two guys in a garage can create a wiki. Two guys in a garage with a million dollar PR budget can create a wiki and get it widely publicised. Two guys in a garage with a fifty million dollar budget can hire a bunch of writers to get the content kickstarted. But ultimately, the problem of persuading thousands of people to contribute to a brand new service is not a problem that anyone knows how to solve -- it either takes off or it doesn't.

Well. It's a problem requiring a creative solution. It's certainly hard. I don't know how to do it, but I wouldn't say it's impossible or all up to fate.

The two guys have an advantage - lots of former editors are sick of Wikipedia, and non-deletionists have nowhere to go. I don't see any reason why two guys in a garage couldn't succeed.

Fork it.

1) what does "competitor" translate to, for non-profits?

2) why write new source if your goal is just to launch another wiki?

http://citizendium.org/ ?

Maybe, although they need to work on the UI. But good start.

That's the wrong direction: more selective.

The right direction: Wikipedia with a constitutional bias against deletionism. Only false, illegal, or privacy-violating information should be deleted. Everything true should be welcomed.

Sweet! You should start one of those.

I look forward to creating the article "List of random numbers generated by hugh's random number generator on September 18, 2008".

At some point, an excessive contributor would have to sponsor their own material. It's a business model!

That would be a useless article, but it would be harmless, assuming a sane policy that doesn't allow for terabyte-long articles that strain server resources. Nobody would link to it and nobody would read it, even if your really posted it - which you wouldn't, because you have better things to do.

I look forward to watching it turn into the 4chan wiki.

It was created years ago and it's called the world wide web.

True, but it was created by one guy and one NeXT cube in a particle accelerator ;-) Talk about odd partnerships.

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