Distributed Economies of Scale Was reading this, ...

What's happening with Wikipedia is an interesting, just pick any potentially controversial entry and it's easy to see how bias creeps in unchecked. The anybody-can-edit-anything doesn't work flawlessly (what does?) either, entries become clogged and the entry is locked down.

Wikipedia is a remarkable achievement, but as things get bigger and more mature you have to have some management processes that ensure integrity and objectivity. Same goes for Open Source software development. Torvalds has done a great job managing Linux, but by all accounts it is his personality and management style that ensure smooth management, which cannot be said for all open source projects.

Link: Distributed Economies of Scale Was reading this, ....

Distributed Economies of Scale

Was reading this, which is a response to the Britannica ed's attack on Wikipedia, which references the fairly seminal 2002 piece by Benkler, which argues that open-source/open-access/massively-distributed production is a fundamentally new production paradigm (the standard other two being firms and markets).

Benkler outlines two mechanisms that make open-source production superior in many situations: lower opportunity costs (what I've termed distributed economies of scale), and efficiency gains in resource allocation via self-selection leading to increasing returns. I'm not so sure about the second one - if there were really these kinds of increasing returns, surely we would see faster growth of open-source production across industries. I also think it's important to note that the means of production must either be distributable (ie, you cant massively distribute a cement factory).

But I'm nitpicking - the paper is highly recommended (I linked to it before, so sorry if you s