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Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

This is the Wikipedia approach to software development. Why does it seem absurd for software yet it seems to work (perhaps inefficiently) for Wikipedia? What if Linus made the Linux master repository world-writable?

If Wikipedia required edits to be reviewed by other editors, they would probably be thwarted with fake editor accounts.

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Why does it seem absurd for software yet it seems to work (perhaps inefficiently) for Wikipedia?

Mostly because software is deeply interconnected - every file will call something within another one. Wikipedia will link to another file, but never depends upon the content within it.

Wikipedia templates are often very interconnected.

But they often have those protected.

That got me thinking, I wonder if you can make a redirect loop or a mega redirect loop that would OOM wikipedia?

There probably was at some point, but being in the top ten sites on the Internet, you get good at that sort of basic security thinking or you get not-on-the-top-ten-anymore.

No, redirects on Wikipedia bottom out after a depth of 2.

It is not the Wikipedia approach. Github, not the project, is more analagous to Wikipedia. A project is self contained with references to other projects, as is a page. A repository or a wiki is a collection of these. Wikipedia doesn't really accept anything. Additionally, it has a culture, guidelines and de facto moderators. A political structure has arisen within Wikipedia, but a cursory look misses that. In those ways, it is similar to open source development and the Linux kernel.

Edit: missed a comma

Various Wikipedia's do have what you are imagining.[0] People are not normally automatically given the right to review changes and even if you do manage to review malicious edits they are easily reverted by others.

Every language has their own policies, but the English Wikipedia only has it enabled on certain pages.[1]

[0] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Flagged_Revisions

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:StablePages

I think it seems more a TwitchPlaysPokemon approach to software.

Wikipedia is for humans. A page with a spelling error is almost as useful as one without. If a page has been changed to "LOL JAKE SUCKS COCK", a user can immediately see what's gone wrong and revert it to the correct version.

With a program, a single syntax error breaks the whole thing, and if the program isn't working then it's often not obvious how to fix it.

>What if Linus made the Linux master repository world-writable?

Goodbye Linux.

Wikipedia articles have topics, this does not.

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