On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 7:27 AM, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
Indeed would it not be great if in ten years time I can google a subject, easily find the wikipedia article, and then, if the subject is not so obscure that only Wikipedia will cover it, follow the link to the academically respectable Otherpedia.com article (which, indeed, is reliable enough to have been allowed as a source for Wikipedia)!
I think this is in fact a market opportunity for a Metapedia. Import the organizational / title trees of all the publically available freely licensed encyclopedias, merge, present readers with alternate views / options / approaches to a particular topic. Optionally, display in parallel, Wikipedia next to Citizendum next to Otherpedia. Click on a hyperlink in any and it works across all the panes. Click on a focus tab for a particular pane and get the wider navigation / editing / etc tabs for that particular encyclopedia.
We could even conceptually add a function to Wikipedia, to add cross-wiki links to other non-WP projects in the same manner as we do to foreign language Wikipedias now. Why should we not have a link to Citizendum or Otherpedia.com on the WP page? We don't lose anything doing that.