The Cunctator wrote:
On 1/10/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I really really really want en: to be good enough
to pull a DVD-ROM
edition from!
Me too! I just worry it'll be used as an excuse for ever-more layers
of needless hierarchy and bureacracy, and ever more attempts to make
articles suitable for printing to dead trees instead of part of a
dynamic web.
Imagine a DVD with a dozen or so Steigenthaler-type messups (quite
likely in almost a million articles).
The German DVD had problems because someone dumped articles about east
Germany from a copyrighted and biased book. They were in Wikipedia for
quite some time, and Directmedia was rather picky about which articles
to use. AFAIK, they had to throw some of the DVDs away (please correct
me if I'm wrong about that).
Wikimedia has just been sued by the family of a (deceased) German hacker
for publishing his real name (even though his name is well known to the
public). The court order, however, was send to Wikimedia Foundation, St.
Petersburg, Russian Federation ;-)
Whoever publishes an English Wikipedia DVD is likely to become target of
legal trouble, which will backfire on Wikipedia in some way. We should
undertake everything in our power to offer articles that are more
reliable than the random "current version". This means additional
controls, which might mean some kind of hierarchy/buerocracy, however mild.
Incidentially, I have recently added a feature to the software which
allows to filter Recent changes to show only changes of articles in some
categories (and their subcategories). It is currently turned off for
fear it might make the database servers explode under the additional
load, though.
Magnus