I agree we should let "a thousand flowers bloom" and then through simple ranking methods, make it easy for people to pick out the best. This discussion reminds me of arguments made against the blogs and other forms of internet publishing. People complain that 99.9% of blogs suck but with collaborative filtering sites such as Google, it's easy to find high quality blog posts (and other internet content). Publish, then filter!<br>
<br>The below's a quote from an article by Clay Shirky:<br><a href="http://www.shirky.com/writings/music_flip.html">http://www.shirky.com/writings/music_flip.html</a><br><p>
"The curious thing about this state of affairs is that in other
domains, we now use amateur input for finding and publicizing. The
last 5 years have seen the launch of Google, Blogdex, Kuro5in,
Slashdot, and many other collaborative filtering sites that transform
the simple judgments of a few participants into aggregate
recommendations of remarkably high quality.
</p><p>
This is all part of the Big Flip in publishing generally, where the
old notion of "filter, then publish" is giving way to "publish, then
filter." There is no need for Slashdot's or Kuro5hin's owners to sort
the good posts from the bad in advance, no need for Blogdex or Daypop
to pressure people not to post drivel, because lightweight filters
applied after the fact work better at large scale than paying editors
to enforce minimum quality in advance. A side-effect of the Big Flip
is that the division between amateur and professional turns into a
spectrum, giving us a world where unpaid writers are discussed
side-by-side with New York Times columnists."</p><p><br></p><p>Kyle<br></p><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 2:17 PM, catch <<a href="mailto:catch56@googlemail.com">catch56@googlemail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">With the current number of contribs, it's not only hard for 'end-users' (whoever they might be) to find modules to suit their needs, it's also hard for developers. As others have noted, some (especially new) developers don't even bother to check before rolling their own and contributing it back. However I've seen well known names publish a module, have an issue in their queue that says 'is this duplicate?', then they've almost immediately joined forces and marked one or the other as deprecated. A lot of work gets wasted that way and it's not really anyone's fault, especially when it's people who always search first before they do any work :)<br>
<br>The more modules there are, the harder it'll be to select one, so more duplicate modules will be written, so there'll be more modules, so it'll get harder to select one...<br><br>We know none of this holds true for all modules, superficially at least - CCK and
flexinode did similar things, but there's a reason why CCK, introduced
later, is on it's way into core now, and the architectural difference
was there from the beginning - so not really duplicate. Plus CCK and Views have eliminated a whole plethora of 'node modules' built for specific tasks - which can be replicated in a couple of minutes via the UI. However that
tends to be the exception which proves the rule, especially when
discussing smaller or more specific projects.<br><br>A similar discussion came up last year (it was shorter than this one I think), and with tongue in cheek I suggested a "Duplicate modules Hall of Shame" somewhere in <a href="http://groups.drupal.org" target="_blank">groups.drupal.org</a> - where you could post up modules you think are very similar, discuss the differences, ways of collaborating - and in aggregate it might lead to us finding better ways to prevent this happening accidentally.<br>
<br>As a side note, the 'pivots' work for module recommendations, which is targeted to mine the forums for information - I'd really, really like to see if this could be applied to Projects and Issues (and groups posts, since a lot of newer projects get more traffic there). That way you'd get "here's some similar modules/issues" when you view one, or even a list displayed as part of the validation on node submission (did you see these yet?). That at least might speed up the process of discovering accidental duplication of work.<br>
<br><br>
</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Research Assistant<br>eBusiness Center @ BYU<br><a href="http://kyle.mathews2000.com/blog">kyle.mathews2000.com/blog</a>