On Sep 22, 2004, at 2:46 PM, Yann Forget wrote: I have to warn that this schedule sounds insanely optimistic. Somebody would need to check and lock off for publishing several thousand articles each day in order to meet this deadline. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Mandrakesoft are aware of our editing processes. They know what they are getting, and that the content has not been verified. They have agreed to take legal responsibility for this. Basically, the only changes we are making is to remove images tagged as fair use, unknown, unverified and other unsuitable ones. Since the image tagging efforts on the English Wikipedia are going fairly slowly, there may be a large number of untagged images would also need to be removed. The arguments over whether a Wikipedia DVD is going to be useful to people aren't really for us to decide. Mandrake obviously think people are interested in this, and if they turn out not to be because they can read it online, then we haven't lost anything. The chances are though that this will significantly increase the exposure of Wikipedia to a wider audience. Hopefully many of them will access it online, and even become editors themselves, but I don't think that detracts from the appeal of having a DVD published. This DVD production is in no way meant to deter people from the validation processes that are being proposed. Obviously these will be hugely beneficial for future distributions. However, it's also going to take a very long time before the product of such processes is ready, so distributing a non-validated version in advance of that is beneficial. No one is claiming this distribution is perfect, but as a snapshot of Wikipedia I feel it is valuable. It's great advertising for us, it's great as an early trial of distributing our content offline, and it's great for raising awareness of the need to tag images properly. I strongly encourage others to help with the tagging drive as there are still many untagged images that can not be distributed at this stage. I'd also like to thank the following people for taking in part in the recent drive to tag images. This is based on the recent changes to the lists of untagged images, and the list of participants at [[Wikipedia:Image copyright tags]], so I apologize in advance for anyone I've missed out: Yann, Jdforrester, Eugene van der Pijll, Tom-, Diberri, Rich Farmbrough, Gamaliel, Stan Shebs, Lupin, Sj, Blankfaze, Chmod007, GeneralPatton, Frecklefoot, Sunborn, Morven, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Trilobite, Poccil, Morwen, Secretlondon, Anthony DiPierro, Imran, Maximus Rex, Flockmeal, Guanaco, and Frazzydee. Thanks also to Looxix for creating the lists of untagged images and everyone who has been doing the same task on the French Wikipedia. Please help with the tagging at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Yann/Untagged_Images and see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_and_Mandrakesoft for further information. Angela.