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