Michael Snow wrote
That seems to me a rather limited view of
Wikipedia's strengths and
potential. You might as well say we're aspiring to nothing more than
creating exactly the same stuff you can find on virtually any website on
the internet.
Well, we create stuff that is
(a) in a comprehensible, readable standardised format and neutrally written
(b) which uses hypertext intensively rather than randomly to 'footnote'
(c) and, very importantly for technical areas, filling in the background on
technical terms, not assuming expertise.
If all we did was to present such a sane, pre-chewed version of what already
exists on the WWW, it would already be a big deal.
I don't for a moment believe that _is_ all we do, and license into the
public domain. For example, on bibliographies of authors, I think WP tends
to the systematic generation of lists of works that exists spottily
elsewhere. The systematic interwikiness cuts across the language bias of
the Web to English.
Charles