Daniel Mayer a écrit: Jee, I was just ready to jump on Erik for the same reason. I second you Mav. Ant

Daniel- In the long term it will be desirable to have multiple views on an article besides NPOV, whether it's a Wikinews story or a Wikipedia article. Duplication can be avoided using powerful diff/merging tools as they are already used in the open source development world (darcs, BitKeeper etc.). Each view will be managed by a group of people who make their own rules as to who else is allowed to add information, with NPOV being the "mother view" from which other views can be extracted (as NPOV is the most inclusive). So you will get a version of the circumcision article approved and edited by the APA, or a version of the creationism article approved and edited by the Institute for Creationism. This mangifies the potential influence of Wikimedia content even further and it is something that other news and information sources cannot easily compete with because they are not open content (ironically, it's also the reason for the success of agencies like AP, Reuters and AFP - they allow their stories to be modified for the purposes of individual users). The edit war problem is negligible in this context, as each group can define its own rules of exclusion. However, whether it is desirable to have such functionality within Wiki[mp]edia is open to debate. I have contemplated a separate "Wikiviews" project, or simply making it as easy as possible for third parties to manage forks of Wikimedia content in their MediaWiki installs. Temporary and fixable problems like "edit wars" are certainly not a strong argument in favor of a very conservative approach, though. NPOV is great, but it does not allow me to make use of my existing "reputation information": I cannot easily get from the current article on creationism to an article that includes the points of view only of the people I trust on this particular topic. On controversial topics, I will have to wade through many pages of text to get to the meat of the matter. Therefore, many people will prefer specialized information sources like EvoWiki and talkorigins.org on such subjects, because they know that their information space is not "polluted". This in itself carries a much greater risk of duplication of effort than us providing the tools to do it properly (easy merging between changing revisions). We should not close our eyes to this problem and explore ways in which we can make Wikimedia content more useful to specific interest groups while maintaining NPOV as the central ideology of the Wikimedia projects. Open content is not just about vertical growth: from 100 articles to 10,000. It is also about horizontal growth: from 1 article about a topic to 10 or 100. Only if we embrace both types of growth we will become the catalyst of the media revolution . Regards, Erik

David- Wikinfo is an example, yes, although they do the keeping-in-sync part manually. I actually wrote a little script that makes the merging of Wikinfo and Wikipedia articles easier a while ago, not sure if anyone uses it. In the long term, I want multiple such forks with specific purposes (views) and I want to facilitate the cooperation between these different variants of our content. Mav's concerns about doing this within Wikimedia are understandable, but false. I will prove this when the time comes. Regards, Erik

I'd like to see this idea tried out with more people involved. Fred

Daniel Mayer wrote: Wikinfo has the Sympathetic Point Of View policy with parallel articles. I would not claim that Wikipedia getting all the hits and publicity is necessarily evidence their approach is worse - first-mover advantage and network effect counts for a *lot* - but I do feel that, whereas SPOV will make strident editors feel better, it doesn't really create better articles for the *reader*. (Much as I enjoy wasting time (and it is wasting time) on IRC, and attending the occasional meet, I'm on Wikipedia for the buzz of creating an end result, not for the social club.) - d.

Erik Moeller a écrit: We will have to disagree with you on this.

On 10/11/04 2:07 AM, "Erik Moeller" <erik_moeller(a)gmx.de> wrote: The number one thing that would help this is to support atomization. The more clearly defined the scope of the entry, the easier it is to find consensus and to discard chaff. As entries get larger, their scope broadens, and conflict, dispute, and confusion ensue.