--- Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:
limholt@excite.com wrote:
One of the goals generally included in the Wiki
1.0 discussion is
the creation of a paper Wikipedia. This sems to
have an assumption
that lot's of material gets dropped or summarized.
Well, I don't *think* so. Right now, we're in the ballpark of the size of Britannica, possibly a bit bigger. But then, we have a fair amount of questionable fluff lurking around. So if we're thinking of 1.0 being approximately equivalent in size and quality to Britannica, we shouldn't have to cut anything good from where we are today.
In the future, this will likely be a problem. If Wikipedia 2.0 follows 1.0 by a 3 year time span, for example, it's likely that it would be twice as big and totally problematic as a print version.
But for 1.0, I don't envision a lot of cutting.
I can totally imagine in the future that we'll have multiple sifted editions, for example:
Wikipedia 2.0p - full version, paper Wikipedia 2.0d - desktop paper, a highly shortened version Wikipedia 2.0e - electronic, no size constraints at all Wikipedai 2.0r - raw, sifted articles plus everything else, too
But rather than get into a game of excessive a priori design, I think we should stick to "1.0 is just 1.0" as a mantra. And what I mean by that is that we keep a 1.0 release simple, a single release, and the approval process focussed on openness and reliability of articles, rather than infinite flexibility for potential printers/publishers/distributors.
I do also like the idea of Wikipedia: History of Rock Music and similar. But "1.0 is just 1.0". :-)
--Jimbo
Although I agree with you in theory, it would just take too much time. If we set up a project where a group of known wikipedians would systematically go through every article would be of great benifit to wikipedia, but we shouldn't halt the wiki development process. After a lot of math, I found that we'd need 45 people to do this over 3 years. Although this makes it seem impossible, think how long and how many people it would take to make wikipedia.
It would be nice if we had a feature of the software for this reviewing thing. It could give a random page from a subset of wikipedia yet to be reviewed, and then you'd edit it. After editing it, you would say if it is britannica-quality yet. If two people said yes for the same article, it would be taken out of the subset of articles to be reviewed. It could still be edited, but it would be assumed that all new edits would be checked and if they were destructive, the article would be returned to encyclopedic quality. All new articles would go to this reviewing subset. Were there any other schemes for article reviewing? LDan
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