On 8/4/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/3/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/3/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
The value is project-wide, not necessarily on an article-by-article basis. And I think Jimbo would say that a high quality encyclopedia is never at odds with producing a free one. Wikipedia could still be high
Eh? Britannica has done pretty well at producing a high quality encyclopaedia, but they haven't gotten off the ground in the free stakes.
I'll Eh? right back at you. Just because EB can produce quality and NOT be free does not at all mean that quality and being free are incompatible.
Ok, we're probably understanding the phrase "at odds with" differently. In any case, I think we agree - an encyclopaedia can be high quality without being free, free without being high quality, or can be both. And there are decisions that can be taken which are effectively trade offs - the quality of EB would probably suffer greatly if it suddenly converted to a wiki with all paid staff sacked. On the other hand, Wikipedia is much higher quality than a number of other "closed source" encyclopaedias.
In any case, going back and forth over the question of whether Wikipedia would be high quality without fair use images seems fairly silly to me since the designation is entirely subjective. I think your position is a little silly but you're allowed to say the same about mine. I think you're putting short-term aesthetics ahead of legal and long-term sensibilities.
Yep. I don't believe a great deal in the future - or maybe I'm impatient and short-sighted. My attitude towards editing Wikipedia (and wikis in general) is "what can I do to make this page better for the next user than it was five minutes ago, and how can I encourage that next user to make it even better for the user after him". Sometimes a short term dip in "quality" has to be taken for the long term - removing useful but unverifiable and POV information, for instance. I don't know that I'm really advocating taking legal risks for short term gains though.
Yes, it's a pity that we have to do all our diagrams from scratch, there are thousands of articles that need some.
So put in a diagram request. There are people who are happy to make diagrams for articles. Filling diagram requests is MUCH easier than photography because you can do it from anywhere and with free software.
You're right, I will.
Steve