Faith-Based Encyclopedia
When I read Robert McHenry’s article on the ”Faith-Based Encyclopedia”, my first reaction was that he was likely going to draw a lot of criticism from the Wiki-pedia community. And judging from his follow-up article, he did.
I am a huge supporter of the open source community. Let me say that again; I am a HUGE supporter of the open source community. I run Linux on my laptop. I use OpenOffice. I’ve used Firefox since it was called Phoenix. The list of software I use that is free or open-source or both is endless. And my company has a product built entirely around OSS products.
But the one problem with the system is that the community is too defensive, both of the system and of their individual products. Of course, the same is true of the “other side”; it’s easy to critisize open source projects for this and that, but in the end, in most cases they aren’t getting paid. But if the scales are tipped, they are tipped against the OSS community.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, criticism of OSS projects are seen immediately as an “attack” rather than an opportunity to look at how to make it better. And more often than not, part of that attack is to respond with “if you don’t like it, don’t use it” or “if you don’t like the way something works, fix it yourself”. I actually agree with everything that Robert says in his initial article, though I think he was a bit too harsh in places.
Robert’s follow-up article is also a bit harsh. I think that he could have summed up in two sentences: “I get it [OSS & Wikipedia]. All I was saying is that Wikipedia is a good source of information but has to fix some issues before it can be considered a quotable source like Britannica is.”
Of course, as with all things news and media related, “nice stuff” doesn’t sell; if Robert had written the article in a different way, it’s likely that no one would have paid attention anyway.
Wed, 02 Feb 2005 16:58 Posted in General
