Look at the discussion page for tennis player Andy Murray, who recently lost to Roger Federer in the final of the U.S. Open. Murray was born in Scotland. The current discussion page has over seven thousand words of back-and-forth about whether he should be described as a British or a Scottish tennis player. (I copied the talk page into Word, deleted anything not directly about Scottish/British, then had Word do the count.)

Those 7,000 words go all the way back to Wednesday of last week. In addition, there are four archives of the talk page The actual article about Murray has some 4,200 words (ignoring the tables of statistics and the text inside footnotes).

For the sake of argument, let’s assume none of the contributors were Scottish-independence zealots or those who oppose them — just folks with strongly held but differing ideas. An awful lot of energy, some of it bound to discourage others from joining the discussion.

So that’s part of the why of any ban, I think. I know nothing about the details of the individual who got banned — but it’s always easier to mess with things than to clean up afterward. The notion that the community will self-police has some merit, but a determined, energetic person (to say nothing of one who’s also self-righteous) can find endless ways around that.

It seems that it would be possible to take Wikipedia in a different direction, but there is no doubt that “Wikipedia” has established a formidable brand. I also understand that there is a meritocracy when it comes to submitting new code and that you have to prove yourself before you are allowed to change any major code in an OS project.

Your comments are greatly appreciated.

Notwithstanding the above technical issue, it seems to me that the big difference is that a big part of Wikipedia is that it is THE Wikipedia. It is the destination.

Actually, Wikipedia is way, way more open than an open source project, come to think of it. No serious open source software project allows anyone to anonymously edit their source code. Usually you have to submit some patches for review before you’re allowed to check in code.

Also, Firefox isn’t really a fork of Mozilla. “Forking” doesn’t so much refer to a different application springing from a common codebase, as two divergent versions of essentially the same software (like GNU Emacs and XEmacs).

Grou.ps is open source, free and ad-free. It was the ads (alternatively a relatively high monthly fee) that made me stop using Ning for this purpose.
Grou.ps is still a little rough around the edges but very flexible and it seems to develop nicely.

Cheers,

Romi