Does my memory deceive me? Or is it true that 2 of the 3 "millionth" articles related to soap operas?

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 6:19 PM, Michael Peel&lt;email(a)mikepeel.net&gt; wrote: <snip> Really? The Telegraph one was poor. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/6042931/Wikipedia- reaches-three-million-articles.html I agree with the first comment: "This piece contains 12 sentences, of which at least 5 are false or misleading [...] Wikipedia was launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, not by Ward Cunningham and Richard Stallman." And so on.

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Michael Peel&lt;email(a)mikepeel.net&gt; wrote: <snip> According to the encyclopedia article, this one in 1728: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclopaedia,_or_Universal_Dictionary_of_Arts_a… "The Cyclopaedia was one of the first general encyclopedias to be produced in English." Another candidate is this one from 1704: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicon_Technicum

Why not scan them and "store" them at wikisource?

Carcharoth wrote:

1,000 pages x 200 volumes = 200,000 pages.  The French one is from the 19th century. The Italian one came out 1929-1938. The Spanish one 1908-1980

I believe they have machines to turn pages, and something to figure out the distorted photo of the book and render it how it would look as a flat page.

How do Google Books and libraries and Project Gutenberg and others do mass scanning and OCR of books? Do they use lots of money and funding to pay lots of people to do lots of scanning on lots of machines, or do they automate it in some way?

* Wikipedia was launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, not by Ward Cunningham and Richard Stallman. True, but this is Wikipedia's fault. "The pioneering concept and technology of Wiki comes from Ward Cunningham, the concept of a free online encyclopedia from Richard Stallman. It was formally launched on 15 January 2001." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1917002,00.html

Time magazine ... can't get excited about the whole business really. But why is Wales not James if Sanger is Lawrence?

Err ... it's Wikipedia's fault if hurried journalists today do nothing but research on it and misinterpret what they find? Puh-lease. To get from that to "It was formally launched on January 15 in 2001 by Ward Cunningham and Richard Stallman" you need to do plenty of miscomprehension exercises. Remember: hacks get _paid_ to do this

often quite large sums, and (in the UK) are supposed to spend time learning the importance of getting the facts straight. Not copying-and-pasting, and then mangling the sense. They have subeditors who are _paid_ to do the mangling.

2009/8/17 Keith Old &lt;keithold(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: WIKIALITY, The Tenderloin, Saturday -- The online encyclopedia, knowledge base, social networking site, essay repository, blog, search engine, news aggregator, dessert wax and floor topping Wikipedia has reached its three millionth article and ceased all editing. Palo Alto Research Center reported that only 1% of edits by random users were kept. "They were all unspeakable shit," said burnt-out administrator WikiFiddler451. "All of them. No, I'm not exaggerating. Go to Special:Newpages and read a day's entries some time. You'll start by deleting the whole database, before you get onto plotting the doom of humanity. Christ, why go on?" Recent media coverage has highlighted the "inclusionist/deletionist" wars of 2005, including enquiries from Endemol looking for a "passionate deletionist" to join Big Brother 11, "preferably one with big tits." It is thought that Wikipedia could have had ten million articles by now had they not viciously abused their editorial powers by deleting your valuable contributions about you, your teacher at school, your garage band or your dog or the many cameraphone pictures you uploaded of your penis. "Everything's already been written," said WikiFiddler451, burning the last of his Star Wars figurines before leaving for his rehabilitation course in social interaction skills and basics of hygiene. "Do you have any idea how big THREE MILLION articles is? A BILLION GODDAMN WORDS! Are you going to read more than a droplet of that in your life? No you aren't. You're following your goddamn Twitter. "But hey, only two million articles are The Simpsons in popular culture or Doctor Who in popular culture. No-one actually reads this stuff, they just write it. We have LiveJournal for stuff people write that no-one wants to read. 'Oh, I wandered lonely as a cheeseburger/ My passionate angst filling my Coke with darkness.' Or Knol. KNOL! I'll just Bing that one." Shell-shocked veterans of Wikipedia are at a loss now that it's all over -- wandering the alleyways of the Internet, mumbling to themselves about "ANI" and "we had to delete the village in order to save it," threatening the policemen moving them on with "arbitration" and bursting into tears when the policeman answers "citation needed." Mere children, sent into the culture wars to save knowledge from horrors they barely understood, and coming home as crippled wrecks. No victory parades for these brave men and women. There is only so much Citizendium, Uncyclopedia and 4chan can do for these child heroes. With your help, we can build Potemkin wikis for these honorable veterans, where they can safely ban and unban, revert and edit-war, and correct the naming of Danzig^WGdansk^WDanzig^WGdansk without the possibility of damage to actual human readers. Please donate so that they may never bug you again. (posted by me at http://is.gd/2opuE ) - d. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

The SOS Children Wikipedia Selection for Schools seems very cut-down, being only several thousand long articles from Wikipedia on a DVD ... so about half the size of the full printed Britannica, then.

Perhaps the more rational approach is to do what our structure can do well, and let other projects in the future try other ways and other things and other goals.

Perhaps the more rational approach is to do what our structure can do well, and let other projects in the future try other ways and other things and other goals.

On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 9:20 PM, geni&lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I think if we had almost every article you would find in a *single volume* encyclopedia up to featured or good status that would be a great foundation.