Yes, one of its uses will be as a database to be mined as an
historical record, but I cannot see why you say that it is the only
one. The actual use and readership of WP pages is very high. There
seem to be some hundred millions or so people right now who find it
useful; I want them to find it more useful yet.
Most of the subjects I work on are well-recorded elsewhere in much
more professional sources, but where there is little of high quality
available for the non-academic reader. We don't need WP as an archive
in science or history or philosophy. There are really good sources
out there. But we do need a easy-to-use and to understand source for
the general reader, a free one, universally accessible. That';s the
part I care most about. It wont interfere with your purpose. But
making it into a low quality vacuum cleaner will detract from its
overall reliability. There are other projects for an internet archive.
Of course we should cover popular culture thoroughly. In a
quality-filtered version. I am one of those supported good plot
summaries. Not long rambling pseudo-transcripts of the script. Not one
sentence teaser is a long list. Good well-written episode descriptions
in two or three clear paragraphs telling someone who isnt going to
see the show what has happened there so they know about it. Good
articles about major and recurring minor characters that summarize
their role from a different aspect. Good articles about the use of
major themes in major creative works--even they are primarily a list.
This is the sort of material not available otherwise on the internet
as well. And we need it for now, when people want to use it, as well
as for later, when they also will.
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 2:01 AM, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote:
David Goodman wrote:
Of course we have a responsibility to the web. we
are writing an
encyclopedia for use.
No, not quite. The Wikipedia that you see on the web is not our product,
that's our working area. It's there first and foremost for editors. The
fact that general readers also find it useful is a happy coincidence
since that's how we draw most of our new editors in.
The product of Wikipedia is our database. If all we cared about was
publishing an online encyclopedia we wouldn't need the GFDL or other
open licence, we wouldn't need to worry about keeping the licensing
consistent and compatible, we could just say "by posting your work here
you're granting us the right to display it on Wikimedia" or somesuch.
There are already tons of other user-generated sites out there with
similar ad-hoc licensing that don't care about ease of reuse.
No, our most important target audience for re-use are people and
organizations like those found on
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks>, or anyone
else who wishes to build something out of the resource we make
available, big or small. Some day Wikipedia-the-project will be defunct
(or evolve into something completely different) and the database will be
what we leave behind for our successors to pick up and use or work with.
Label and categorize things, sure. Many mirrors and forks will likely be
interested only in a subset of our content and this sort of labeling
will allow them to cull that out more easily. But it makes no sense to
cull out cull out topics for them ahead of time because we don't know
what they'll be interested in. Maybe someone down the road will want to
make the Encyclopedia Pokemonia, or set up a competitor for IMDB that
focuses on TV shows, or whatever, and they could have used Wikipedia's
articles for that.
The web context we work in is aware of other
browsers and other web
services. We arent making a new system from scratch, we work in that
environment, and we need to pay attention to how we are used and we
need to have respect for those who depend upon us. No large
information system on the web can operate in isolation from google.
Sure it can. If Google were to decide tomorrow to exclude Wikipedia from
their search results entirely we wouldn't close shop and shut down.
I personally don't use Google very much any more for searching for
general information, I have a Wikipedia search installed in my browser's
search bar to go there directly. IIRC Firefox 3 is going to be
distributed with Wikipedia as one of the default searches pre-installed.
Not to mention the traffic we get from direct links people post on their
own external web sites, and from the other various search engines still
out there. Google's handy but we don't really need it.
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David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG