Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
What's wrong with extracts of Wikipedia? I
have a
book
called "Micropedia of World History"
(that looks
like
it's part of a series) which is 300 pages of
historical events in timeline form. As I look
through
it, I see that wikipedia could do better than this
if
we put some work into it consolidating our
timeline
and historical articles and condensing them.
On my shelf I have "The Timetables of History" which
does the same thing
(but only to 1990) in 631 pages. What would be
unique and distinctive
about a Wikimedia publication of this sort?
Specialized encyclopedias don't have to be
that
specialized. For example, I think we would have
done
excelently on that encyclopedia of American
Biography,
but it would be better if we extended it to all
biographies. We could call it the encyclopedia of
people or something. All of our stubs on people
would
still help, because it's better than nothing
if it
is
used as a reference book. Haven't you seen a
2-sentence entry in a real encyclopedia? I have, at
least in World Book (I'm not sure if it counts as a
real encyclopedia, though).
The same thing for biographies. If we are just
reproducing what is
already easily and widely available, our publication
will not have the
intellectual value that we want it to have. The
citizen of a third
world country is likely to be far more interested in
the biogrphies of
his fellow citizens than of Americans. Selling him
biographies of
Americans is more likely to reinforce his existing
attitudes about
Americans. We've got a long way to go before we can
produce a credible
biographical directory that would be acceptable in
the third world. The
problem is not so simplistic as permitting
2-sentence entries.
Ec
What's so special about a wikimedia encyclopedia?
LDan
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