My article certainly wasn’t knocking “open source”, and it wasn’t even directly knocking Wikipedia. The thesis of my article is that the creative process is one that takes place only in individuals. If you accept that argument, I think it has a huge impact on the way Wikipedia ought to be run, but I leave that reasoning to another article, or perhaps to another author (I don’t much care about Wikipedia any more, I’m more interested in figuring out what was successful about Wikipedia and what was unsuccessful, and starting from scratch rather than trying to reform from within).

In a future article, I hope to explore the more positive side of collaboration. Great software, great films, great orchestras, great buildings – they are all collaborative works to which many individuals lend their creative abilities. But they have great architects, great directors, great conductors, great architects, that coordinate those creative energies and put them together.

“Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross created Firefox. Apache was created by Robert McCool. Michael Widenius wrote the majority of the first version of MySQL… Jerry Yang and David Filo made Yahoo. Larry Sanger and Ben Kovitz invented Wikipedia.”

Perhaps you meant crowdsourcing (And the Sucker Map) as something different than open source / Commons-based peer collaboration?

But the decline of civilization was just my extrapolation of the Wisdom of Crowds versus the Cult of the Amateur. I’m not so concerned with defending the open source model, it doesn’t need it, when you’ve got billions of dollars worth of business relying on open source apps in critical locations, I’m pretty sure even a non-expert can accept that argument. It’s more interesting to me when that model is applied to knowledge presentation and how the picking and choosing of “experts” who support the various sides comes out.

Thanks for the publicity though.