Textual Reflexions

I am working on both Wikipedia and PGDP, which takes me quite a bit of my free time. Recently I decided to talk with my collaborators in a inexpensive and rapid way.

Well, I had many surprises. The first was Jabber: I contributed to the development of clients for other IM, mainly Yahoo!, to be able to use the Voice Chat that is very important for my life, since I move often and I had to talk to my buddies with intercontinental calls. After I discovered Jabber, I found out that all my work was a waste of time. Actually the proprietary IM change very often nowadays, change they proprietary protocols in order to prevent third part clients to connect to their networks. They release clients only for Windows and if they provide a Unix version, this one really suck. But Jabber is different: it’s free, the protocol it’s an Internet Draft, the servers are Open Source and it can connect to every possible proprietary network with its transports. I stopped interesting me in any other IM and changed all my Yahoo! projects mailing lists with the Jabber equivalents.

I had another surprise when looking at the IRC channels of Wikipedia (Yes, I managed to pass through my firewall). I never noticed before that the development of the English Wikipedia is so fast, with an edit every second. I evaluated in about 40000 articles the critical mass that prevents a Wikipedia from dying: The Italian Wikipedia is struggling to arrive to 10000 articles and it’s not powerful enough to catch real users and not only contributors. Hope it will be better. Maybe it could be slashdotted