On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 10:04:56 -0500, Poor, Edmund W Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com wrote:
The latest issue of Software Development magazine is on-line now:
Yes, that's great.
And I found a professor of church history whose students cite Wikipedia in papers they write.
How does the professor feel about this?
The question is, where do we go from here? Larry Sanger left the project for a mix of reasons, but SOME of them made sense (at least to me). We never resolved the tension between:
A) Anyone can edit any article, any time; and, B) People can count on every article to be accurate and fair.
Not enough people were interested in Larry's "Sifter Project". I don't know if anyone is using Magnus Manke's "tagging" software. 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 was approached by the director of a foundation (with a multi-million dollar budget) to create a fork of Wikipedia leading to a print edition
Sexy. I'm pretty sure we will publish a print edition on our own well before 2008. Would this change their interest in doin the same? Perhaps they want to publish a niche variant that we would not be interested in...
to be published no later than 2008. If I do this, maybe it will get me out of your hair? (The Cunctator wrote, "Rinse, wash, repeat.")
Get who out of whose hair? I wish I saw more of you around the mailing list, in fact... don't let the trolls stress you out too much.
-- +sj+
On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 10:01:20 -0700, Tom Haws hawstom@sprintmail.com wrote:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
I don't have all the answers, but the first idea that popped into my mind was:
- Let users (or a subset of them) "tag" an article
version.
- A tag (or "flag") could take on any assigned
meaning.
- My favorite tag idea: "Vandalism-patrolled by mav" (!)
- Here's another: "Selected for the print edition"
This is the right approach. All article versions need to have several slider flags associated with them in the database. Some of those flags, like confidence, need to be automatically set according to the software's judgement of the trustworthiness of the editor (based on some reputation model). Other flags need to have an interface radio button setting so readers/editors can rate the article versions on any number of aspects.
Or if a Wikipedian makes a minor correction (like spelling, punctuation, grammar; or an obviously relevant internal link) to an article version tagged by the foundation - then it would be GREAT if the software would notify the foundation's editors. They could quickly review the change and probably be GLAD to endorse the current version. This would PREVENT forking, or at least reduce it to a bare minimum.
Better yet, if a Wikipedian makes a SIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENT to a foundation-tagged article version, I'd think the foundation would be OVERJOYED to endorse it. (I'm planning to educate them about using the History and Diff functions.)
Right, Ed. There is absolutely no reason for a fork. All we need is some proactive, creative, and *bold* programming experimentation.
Long live Respectipedia.org!!
Tom Haws
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