Interesting points.<p>Most popular alternatives to Wikipedia, commercial and non-commercial, work with ownership of articles, or a stricter editorial policy. [1] This includes Scholarpedia, Citizendium, Conservapedia. It comes at the cost of volume and recency. In a sense, Wikipedia deals with all the advantages and disadvantages of modern, free democracy.<p>An aspect that the article seems to miss is the different demographics of Wikipedia and GitHub. (There are a lot fewer high-schoolers vandalizing GitHub repositories out of boredom.) The drawback of GitHub is not just that pull-requests must be accepted by authorized users, but also the bureaucracy of learning version control. Compared to Wikipedia, anyone with domain knowledge can hit "Edit" and add their bit.<p>I would rather like to see a synthesis of StackOverflow's point system, so the quality of your contributions grants you privileges for certain sections of the site, applied to wiki articles.<p>Another difference for comparison between GitHub/StackOverflow and Wikipedia is that you have ownership of your contributions. I occasionally go back and revise the most popular StackOverflow answers I've made for posterity. It's been years since I last made a change to one of my Wikipedia contributions. The last I remember was that someone had restructured a part of an article I'd written from scratch and added wrong information.<p>[1]: <a href="http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/top-7-alternatives-to-wikipedia/" rel="nofollow">http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/top-7-alternatives-to-wikipedia/</a>
I wonder how many times the author spent time making a nice GitHub pull request for a popular repo. You know, taking care that you match the coding style, document your changes and reasons for them, make sure the CI tests pass, etc. only to see it sit in the tracker for months without anyone merging it or commenting. Then after a year or two, when you already forgot about it, you get a mail that someone closed your ticket for being outdated or not merging cleanly (to the master that had a year worth of work done on it since you last looked)<p>GitHub can be a source of bitter disappointment and annoyance just like Wikipedia.
I agree with @Vorticalbox in the comments:<p>>(and typically white male) that is an unnecessary comment. Sex or gender,
>even if they are the majority, has very little to do with the way wiki works.
>
>Even the minority groups will act the same way.<p>I would go further and say that it probably depends on what article you are editing as to what gender/ethnicity causes "disappointment and annoyance". I have no idea why it is suddenly popular (and not disputed) to make remarks like this in otherwise good articles.<p>That said, I think some of the ideas in this blog are not correct. One of Wikipedia's benefits is that it is consolidated into one effort, rather than many forks and a major distributed effort. Also as a number of comments have suggested, PR's can sit for a while before being rejected depending on how active a repository is. Other than having to use wiki markup (which in my opinion is confusing and terrible), there's a reasonably low entry barrier for contributers to jump over. Expecting people to use a form of Git (even with a UI) could end up being a lot of hassle.
> But I imagine that new and old contributors get some satisfaction when their contribution get "merged into master", no matter how much that sounds like yielding to the hierarchy.<p>I spent one day in my weekend upgrading a couple of Rubygems to be compatible with Ruby 2.5 after some things were deprecated. One of the authors just closed my PR, left no comments, and committed his own changes to master. His solution was a little bit different than my own, but he was able to commit to my branch.<p>A "Thank you", or a "Hey! I did not know that it was deprecated in 2.5, thanks!" would have been appreciated, and I felt a bit miffed even though it is not a big thing.
Thanks for the comments, folks. Apparently this post is too controversial or off-topic (or maybe just deemed silly) for Hacker News - it's been removed from the ranking!
When you people will be able to scale git to accept the number of revisions Wikipedia has, and add several new ones per second with millisecond latencies, please let me know.<p>Also, only a programmer could think git is a friendlier interface than a wiki.<p>There are things that are wrong in the wiki comunity, none of which would be solved by using github instead.<p>Not to point out that the forking model would lead to fragmentation and GitHub is actually a privately owned for-profit platform, of course.
"...annoyance at the legalistic (and typically white male) Wikipedian."<p>How are skin color and gender relevant to the article or the point being made?