On 6/21/06, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 21/06/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
I think that there would be user value in having available a human-reviewed WP derivative of some sort.
I see the logical process as being a separate project. It could be a WP project, or another outside project. Not a fork, but a grooming process for articles. All contributions made at WP, versions found to be stable and useful then "promoted" to live on otherPedia.
With a million items in the wikipedia, there would be a strong tendency for the groomed version to get way behind, and if that happens most users won't use it, why would anyone assist in the grooming?
The default WP assumption of "Quality" seems to be, "an OK enough article, on any encyclopedic subject, which anyone can improve (and vandals can vandalize, but likely to be rapidly fixed again)".
An alternate project might assume a definition like "a good to great article, on core encyclopedic subjects, which reviewed community improvements are eventually included in." One could easily pick a superset of all the major print and paid online encyclopedia subject articles as the target set for an initial version of such a project - a more reasonably sized target to manage. "Just" having a free alternative which has an article for anything those guys do, is probably good enough for most people. Extra bandwidth can be used to expand beyond that somewhat, but the keys would be "free" and "comparable" and "good quality"
I believe in the first, hence my WP contributions. I also believe in the seond as a worthy goal, though not enough to kick off a major project today to do it.
Again, I wouldn't suggest forking to do it. Using WP as the "source" for the selected encyclopedia (thus, second project contributors wanting to improve would go to the WP page and improve) and not forking as a general rule is almost certainly the right approach.