The Cunctator wrote:
- The job of the current Wikipedia is not to be a perfect encyclopedia,
but to be a source for the great "1.0" version. That version will weed out everything that doesn't belong in an encyclopedia.
I find this argument disturbing and wrong. I certainly hope this is not the consensus understanding of the role of Wikipedia. Have I missed some official position statements?
I would have said it a little bit differently, and in a way that I think would quell your concerns completely.
I think that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, that the kinds of things that we've been discussing are all things that belong in an encyclopedia, and that our view of what belongs in an encyclopedia should be much more expansive (in terms of how 'important' something has to be before 'deserving' an entry) than Britannica, etc. We're creating something astounding and innovative and new. (How else will I win the Nobel Prize in Literature? ;-) )
I also think that it's legitimate that "1.0" is going to be space constrained in some important ways, most significantly in that 1.0 will be designed to be on paper, to be distributed at low cost to hundreds of millions of people who don't have access to computers. (How else will I win the Nobel Peace Prize? ;-) )
But I think we should think of those space constraints as unfortunate realities of the paper medium.
It isn't that somehow the paper-friendly 1.0 is the "real" project, while Wikipedia is merely a crufty way to generate content for it. Both are important goals, and they should not be set against each other.
--Jimbo