Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
==What Wikipedia is not==
14. Mere collections of public domain or other source
material; such as entire books, original historical
documents, letters, laws, proclamations and other
source material that are only useful when presented
with their original, un-modified wording.
For me, the key phrase is "only useful". For instance, we've
sucked in quite a bit from the Dictionary of American Naval
Fighting Ships; the content is about as authoritative as one
can get, and is frequently written as well as anything else
in wikipedia, in which case there's not much to improve on
once links are added. However, there are times when we have
to prune out the anti-communist rah-rah left over from the 50s,
update with ship info postdating a DANFS volume, and in a very
very few cases - fix an actual mistake. Over time I expect
that the wikipedia ship articles will become better than their
DANFS ancestors.
So use of the PD info gives us a leg up in the goal of producing
a reference superior to all others; by cutting out some typing
and fact-collecting time, we get more cycles to spend on areas
for which the info isn't as well-organized already.
Stan