On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
The Mangoe wrote:
This has topic-drifted like mad, so please excuse this as being a collection of utterly unrelated material.
One of the things that has bothered me is the way in which Wikipedia has tended to attempt to take over from more specialized efforts which are surely more authoritative than anything we can produce.
Unless these specialized efforts are also NPOV and under the GFDL (or similar CC licence) there really is a benefit to be gained in reinventing that particular wheel.
Spell it out, then. My sense on a lot of these topics is that we are simply a mirror inferior to the original.
It would be nice to come up with some way to turn ourselves into a portal to the good (meaning reliable) stuff for these subjects.
In terms of being able to organize and integrate the information it's hard to beat the benefit of simply incorporating it directly into Wikipedia.
I greatly disagree. Our ability to organize data is limited by our presentation structures. Database-like presentation of tabular data is something we cannot do, but people will continue to write a page on each datum involved because that's what our structure encourages. Regardless of its accuracy, IMDB will probably be a better source, because it is specialized for that particular field. The same is inevitably going to be true of many other fields. Right now we're talking about converting the article on US lighthouses into a sortable table. The problem we are going to run into is that there are well over a thousand entries. There are already several other such directories out there, and about the only thing I can really say that we offer over them is legally plagiarizable text and the correction of certain inaccuracies.