[Foundation-l] Forking the Wiki

[Scott Nelson]

On Jan 5.2005, at 22:08, Robin Shannon wrote:

> how about we go back to the idea of wikipeople, what's
> wrong with it?

Why would these people not just be included in the Wikipedia? 
Encyclopedia's are supposed to be the cumulative sum total of man's 
knowledge: the major reason for excluding John Smith in the past has 
been the cost of printing - there's an inherent limitation.

Wikipedia doesn't have this limitation: there's a  marginal cost for 
adding an entry. Why wouldn't you just add these entries to the 
Wikipedia? People searching specifically for these people would find 
them; people searching for victims of an event such as nine-eleven 
would find them (either by finding the master entry in a search and 
then following a link, or by searching for the specific person)

> Its been around for quite a while and hasnt got up yet.
> Why? We already have content to put into it (11/09wiki) and it could
> tie up some loose ends, so what are the objections to it?

Separating information into needless categories would be my only 
"objection", and I use the word cautiously. It's not really an 
objection, just a philosophy: I'd rather have life's information in one 
single source, with a good search engine (i.e. well meta-tagged data or 
really effective search) than have 100 sources.

Of course, I realize the former might be a pipe dream, but I still 
think it's a good dream. Robarts library almost fulfilled it for me for 
a while.
--
Skot Nelson
skot at penguinstorm.com