Lemmy is booming

I have never before received so many reactions and comments on my Lemmy posts before, so it’s obvious to see, that there are many new members here.
Welcome to all the new! And I’m looking forward to see more of you here.
Cheers!

  • potcandan@lemmy.one
    1·
    2 years ago

    I guess I just don’t get how being open sourced code is really relevant to Wikipedia? The code is not special is it? They don’t need donations to pay for elite programmers, it’s servers and IT people. The code being open source means that someone else can copy their own Wikipedia if they felt like competing and thought for some reason that they could. The fact that Wikipedia Foundation is non-profit basically precludes this but I think you answered my question basically anyway, they don’t rely on only donations.

    • wiki_me@lemmy.ml
      2·
      2 years ago

      I guess I just don’t get how being open sourced code is really relevant to Wikipedia? The code is not special is it? They don’t need donations to pay for elite programmers, it’s servers and IT people. The code being open source means that someone else can copy their own Wikipedia if they felt like competing and thought for some reason that they could. The fact that Wikipedia Foundation is non-profit basically precludes this but I think you answered my question basically anyway, they don’t rely on only donations.

      It’s relevant that it’s open source because you don’t have to pay for it and a competitor could arise (iirc there is a startup that does that, provide a “better” user interface to wikipedia), and the software is pretty complex so you should pay full time programmers and UX researchers and designers.

      • potcandan@lemmy.one
        1·
        2 years ago

        I guess so. I would really love to see the paid competitor that successfully displaces Wikipedia. It would have to be extremely impressive wouldn’t it? Like paradigm shift level impressive. Any startup that currently claims to do it “better” will also need to make it available for free, or instantly fail because of no users ever bothering to sign up.

    • DivergentHarmonics@beehaw.org
      1·
      2 years ago

      The Wikipedia software is used by many institutions. When i still worked in uni, we tried it for our group internal documenting. In the end went for a less complex wiki software, though. :-)

      • potcandan@lemmy.one
        1·
        2 years ago

        I mean it’s a different topic, aside from how a business (for profit or not) takes software (foss or not) and makes money from it. Wikipedia software is used a lot I’m just saying it’s not relevant to what I was talking about. Like if companies didn’t use this free software for internal documenting they would use something else, no biggie. In the same way that if the worlds largest online encyclopedia no longer had Wikipedia software, they would use something else, no biggie. The word wiki is like the word kleenex and that’s great for the founder of wikipedia, maybe? But it’s still just tissue paper.