infinite knots

Martin posted about an unpleasant experience with win7 fans ranting about open source.

It's funny, in wikipedia really early on before it became the ubiquitous thing it is today, I remember basically all the same style of arguments being made against it. "Look at how full of errors it is compared with Britannica; it'll never catch on." "Sure lots of people have been contributing to it, but that's just a fad; contributors will bore of it - let's see if it's still around 10 years from now." "Something produced by amateurs in their freetime will never reach encyclopedia quality levels. It has to attract serious contributors from academia before it'll be any good." "Sure it may be available for free, but it's so chock full of useless trivia that anyone serious about needing solid information is going to pay for a real encyclopedia." "Any random troll can edit a Wikipedia article and insert any drivel; how can it be at all trustworthy?"

Blah blah blah. In the end those points were irrelevant. Wikipedia now is usually the top link when searching some general topic on google. Wikipedia *could* exist, there was demand, and volunteers willing to do it. Inevitable. *Poof* Done.

Well, what I gloss over is tons and tons of hard work by a huge number of people.

One example. Early on we were so desperate for good encyclopedia-quality content, that it was proposed we plain old steal it from Britannica. It happened that the 1911 edition was in the public domain and thus legally we could just copy and paste it right into Wikipedia. Presto! Instant Encyclopedia-quality content.

Check out the original copied version of Alfonso_X_of_Castile, and compare it with the current page on Alfonso X of Castile. As a medieval king, Alphonso seems quite pedestrian, not the sort that would inspire volunteers to do detailed research and reporting on. Yet check out how much work went into his wikipedia page -- photos of monuments, a detailed life history, an essay on his intellectual contributions to history, annotated references, reading lists, and on and on. You can still seem remnants of the original text... "As a ruler, Alfonso showed legislative capacity"... "His nobles, whom he tried to cow by sporadic acts of violence, rebelled against him"... "they denounced him as an enemy of the faith"... You can clearly see the ancestral bones, but in terms of depth and quality it's like night and day.

And it's all because of a lot of individuals who each put in a few bits of time here and there. The same is going to happen with FOSS in general, it'll just take a somewhat longer time frame since we're dealing more in C code than in English prose... but there's a lot more ways to provide a contribution. Even doing nothing more than cutting and pasting can end up having a huge payoff.