On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 10:21 AM, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 8:13 PM, Platonides
<Platonides(a)gmail.com> wrote:
You have a copy of wikipedia on your hard disk.
You can access it.
But your computer lifetime is finite. And you also don't know for how
much time you'll still have electric current.
What do you do?
Screw Wikipedia. If I want to preserve useful knowledge, I'll make
sure to safeguard my textbooks. In terms of utility for rebuilding
society, the value of Wikipedia is zero compared to even a tiny
university library. And there are many thousands of university
libraries already conveniently scattered around the world, not a few
of them in subbasements where they'll be resistant to nasty things
happening on the surface.
Certainly not zero. Perhaps 10%? Neither textbooks nor wikipedia are
normally designed to give a total soup-to-nuts explanation of how to
do something.
But you're right that textbook-style knowledge is still relatively
cloistered, ununified / siloed by author, and poorly covered by
wikipedia/wikibooks. If there are 10,000 essential textbooks, thats
only ~10x as much information as is in Wikipedia already. How do we
effectively include that in Wikimedia's work?
I think that the "cheatsheet / overview / bootstrapping" version of
information about a topic is quite valuable and useful, and that few
people create such materials today [we don't have a good noun for that
kind of work, for instance].
SJ