> From: Sj
> > And I found a professor of church history whose students cite
> > Wikipedia in papers they write.
>
> How does the professor feel about this?
I dunno. I ran into him after lunch, while visiting the seminary where
he teaches. I wanted to talk to someone about getting the grad students
there, to polish their English skills by contributing to Wikipedia.
(Prof. Fuzheado led some of his students in this, and I suppose having
their articles edited mercilessly was of some benefit to them.)
But he suggested I talk to the academic dean, Dr. Andrew Wilson, who is
in charge of their ESL program. Andy was less interested in my ESL idea
than in a newly revived project of a colleague of his: Dr. Frank
Kaufmann, Director of Interreligious Affairs at the Interreligious and
International Federation for World Peace (IIFWP). I met with Frank on
Monday night about possible incorporation of Wikipedia content in the
IIFWP's proposed Encyclopedia.
I confess that I was so excited by this latter possibility that I forgot
all about the history professor!
> Do we need
> > to fork?
>
> I'm not sure how forking would help, but we do need to
> * get simple tagging/rating software to work (neither
> templates nor categories are scalable substitutes at present)
> * have more explicit metadata [license info, article type,
> article content flags; user licensing info, user flags]
> * encourage the regular production of static,
> highly-organized subsets of
> our dynamic, somewhat chaotic whole. (CDs/DVDs and their preparation
> steps; a variety of organizations of the encyclopedia, in
> online and print
> versions)
I like tagging. Ever since I was a kid ("you're it!"). No, seriously!
Maybe mav and I can get Magnus Manke's software in gear for this.
I've been asked to propose a budget.
> Sexy. I'm pretty sure we will publish a print edition on our
> own well before 2008. Would this change their interest in
> doing the same? Perhaps they want to publish a niche variant
> that we would not be interested in...
Well, it would be heavy on World Peace, I guess (not much interest here
along those lines, everyone would rather talk about who can ban whom, or
fight about the correct name of Danzig/Gdansk. [By the way, Frank seemed
to know more about the dispute over the name of that city than I ever
picked up by reading Wikipedia.])
The IIFWP isn't looking to make money on a print edition or a DVD.
Perhaps they could fulfill Jimbo's dream of distributing a high-quality
encyclopedia to schools in poor African countries. (They are an NGO of
the UN, by the way.)
Uncle Ed