[Textop] Reflections on success conditions

[Larry Sanger]

As an interesting aside, I direct your attention to this other wiki
"debate guide" project that was started a few years ago:

http://www.philowiki.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

I found it for the first time yesterday.  It appears, from a glance at
the Main Page history, that the project got started December 13, 2004.
It also appears to have been a dud.  Why?  Why is it the case that the
person who started it is the only person who is still working on it?

It's the same reason that *most* collaborative community projects
ultimately fail: the *concept* behind the project, and the set of
guidelines that implemented the concept, was not compelling to enough
people to generate "critical mass."  To be blunt, the organizer (no
offense intended to him in particular--I'm using his project as an
example) appears not to have really thought through what he is trying to
do.

As with the case of Wikipedia, I put *enormous* amounts of thought into
designing a project.  I try to think about every aspect of it.  But it
is a relatively simple vision that drives every policy I recommend.  In
the case of the Debate Guide Project, the vision may be summarized this
way:

"I want to 'get to the bottom' of some matter of controversy.  I want to
make up my mind in as rational a way as possible.  So I want to read a
neutral summary of the debate, a summary that is *credible*, i.e., that
represents the best thinking of each side.  I want to see competing
arguments side-by-side so that I can compare their merits.  I want to
have the whole dialectic, with replies, and rebuttals, and replies to
rebuttals, at my disposal.  But I do not want to have endless rehashing
of the same issues, as one often sees on Internet forums.  Nor do I want
to see relatively idiosyncratic nonsense; again, I want to see the
*strongest* thinking on each side.  I want it to be a comparatively
static (though updatable) *summary* of the debate."

>From that general vision flows the requirements of the Debate Guide
Project (http://tinyurl.com/kq5dt).

Once thinking things through at least preliminarily, I then take the
crucial extra step of asking you, the community, to give me your best
critical feedback.  I *always* adjust, add to, and occasionally scrap
ideas based on feedback I get.  If I cannot motivate enough other people
to work on a project with me, I know I have failed, and I take that as
evidence that I need to change something.  My job is to make things
work.

So that's why I always ask "What do you think?" and even if I do not
always agree with you, I really mean it--I *need* your feedback.  And
the more feedback you give, and the more involved you become, the less
it becomes "my" project and the more it becomes "our" project--and the
better chance our collective creation has a chance of "independent
survival."  As in the case of Wikipedia, the ability of the project to
survive without me is evidence of my success in getting it started.

--Larry