On 21/12/2007, Monahon, Peter B. Peter.Monahon@uspto.gov wrote:
The whole point of Wikipedia was trusting another source than academia, so-called authority, and so-called stability! People who say "it can't go into Wikipedia unless it's been published somewhere else first" drive me crazy - it's not "Book-report-a-pedia". Like the scene at the beginning of Stargate (where he corrects the translation of hieroglyphs saying "that textbook is wrong, but everyone still uses it anyway"), all those mindsets are doing is re-perpetuating the supremacy of the pedantic (and wrong) decisions of dead writers and dead publishers. Please leave them buried. Please bring life to Wikipedia. Wikipedia was supposed to breathe NEW LIFE into knowledge pooling, not just be a collective (ces)pool of the dead.
It depends who you ask. As far as I understood it, that it was meant to produce an encyclopedia was the only definition. Producing a stable, fixed, *paper* version was certainly being actively pursued in mid-2004.
While it may well have the potential to be much more than that, it's simply factually incorrect to state that this was "the whole point."
- d.