why have so many distributions ? why have so many os ? why have so many mailing list ? why have ilug bom why not just fsf.in ?
Not a completely accurate analogy :-)
Why are there so many distributions/os', because nearly each has a specific philosophy, and or commercial interest. Are there distro's who are just copying others for the sake of creating a distro, yes there have been but they don't do so well are die pre maturely. Natural selection prevails.
why have so many mailing list ? why have ilug bom why not just fsf.in ?
Well, i think that answer is pretty obvious :-)
ilug bom is a far more diverse list in terms of opinions, belief's, action and motive compared to fsf.in which has a singular well defined agenda as defined by their philosophical standpoint and its own action plan for the same.
In contrast, if you have a wiki which is essentially a public document open to CRUD(CReate Update Delete) and discussion, it evolves over a period of time. If you create two same topic Wiki's in two different places and they have will probably have different members editing them(as a single person will find it tedious to post the same thing in two places on regular basis) also what we write once is generally a spur of the moment thing - pretty instinctive. Will we have same feelings and passion doing it yet for the same document in another place? Probably not. If we forced ourselves to try as hard as possible to give the same content in the 2nd place as well it would be a clear waste of time and energy.
Never the less it would be an interesting behavioral study(just as a study) to have such a scenario, wherein you would have two Wiki's with would evolve (probabalistically) in a different(or similar) manners based on the environment(user tempraments, events, incidents etc) around them. The Wiki effectively becomes a barometer of the opinions and belief's of that system(set of people).
Regards,
- vihan