What Wikipedia Itself Has To Teach Us

Before I went to bed last night, I thought about Wikipedia.
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"Wikipedia has rendered Encyclopedia Britannica et al obsolete."

Speaking from my own experience:

• as a child in elementary school and middle school, one my favorite things to do was to flip to random pages in Encyclopedia Britannica or Grolier's or what have you and read about the fascinating people, places, and things in our world.
  
• as a child in middle school and high school, I still enjoyed doing this but no longer did it with paper encyclopedias; instead, I did it with Encarta, the popular Windows 95 encyclopedia on CD-ROM.
  
• as a young adult in college and medical school, I still enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) doing the same thing as before only now I do it not with any corporate encyclopedia but with the free encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

I think I speak for everybody when I say that we all do. I can hardly think of anybody who still turns to a heavy 26-volume set of Encyclopedia Britannica. And I don't even know that they still sell Encarta anymore. The world community has embraced Wikipedia despite the numerous and fair criticisms it has been inundated with.

When I think of what the major criticisms of Wikipedia are, I think that the question of whether we can defend Wikipedia or not becomes essentially the same exact question of whether we can defend Linux or not, or whether we can defend any of the numerous open source projects which have arisen over the course of the last 20 years. But how, then, do we explain Wikipedia's success against Linux's (comparative) failure?

Here is a brief list of some corporate products and their open source counterparts. I will write in bold those products which I use more frequently.

Encyclopedias: Britannica vs. Wikipedia
Word Processors: Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice
Operating Systems: Microsoft Windows vs. Linux
Media players: Windows Media Player vs. VLC
Web Browsers: Internet Explorer vs. Mozilla Firefox
Instant Messengers: AOL Instant Messenger vs. gAIM or Trillian
Video Editing Software: Windows Movie Editor vs. Avidemux
Audio Editing Software: ??? vs. Audacity
Remote Control protocols for PC: ??? vs. XPadder

From my own list, what I notice is ...

• All things being equal, I am more likely to use the commercial or brand-name software. (e.g. AIM, which is brand-name but free.)
  
• For important purchases, I am more likely to trust the commercial software. (e.g. Windows)
  
• I tend to use open source software only when it makes life easier than with the commercial software (e.g. Wikipedia) -or- when it offers functionality not found with the commercial software. (e.g. VLC's built-in codecs)

I think these observations raise some important points to use against the critics who argue that Wikipedia and Linux are inextricable in these sorts of open source debates:

1. the reason Wiki caught on but Linux didn't has nothing to do with a market monopoly!
If it did, then Wiki should never have been able to penetrate a market so firmly controlled by the encyclopedia oligopoly of old.

2. Wiki caught on because it was FREE -AND- EASY to use.
3. Linux has failed to catch on because it is ONLY FREE.
It is not easier for most Windows users to use Linux.
4. Whether to make Linux more accessible to laypeople or not has been one of, if not the major forces dividing the Linux userbase in half.
Those who support bringing on the laypeople write things like Ubuntu.
Those who support sticking to Linux's roots as a small, secure little kernel which the end-user is invited to customize on his own time in his own way if he sees fit write things like Gentoo.

Whether Linux catches on with the general public remains to be seen, but I think it's only a matter of time. Furthermore, I think it's clear to everybody that if Linux does catch on with the general public, it will be a GUI-centric operating system which invites users to let their systems be maintained by HQ -- an OS like Ubuntu -- and not a terminal-based operating system which encourages users to do everything on their own, from installation to maintenance to customization -- an OS like Gentoo.

The people who refuse to acknowledge this, I think, are in denial. Free does not always trump Costly. Not when Costly is co-packaged with Easy. Only when Free is co-packaged with Easy can it win. And when you have the triumvirate of Free, Easy, and Secure/Stable, then you pretty much are guaranteed to win the market.