Ray Saintonge wrote:
There's even something healthy about having more
than one active
project, in that if anything happens to one, the other is still there.
I think this is true.
If supporting EL were to be considered as a viable
first choice, I would
be inclined to ask questions about their long term financial viability.
What guarantee is there that they will not be a refuge for spamvertising?
Well, financial viability is pretty easy for a wiki encyclopedia, I
think. There is no need for employees, at least not for the central
mission of the encyclopedia, and so all that's needed is a server and
bandwidth. Both are getting cheaper all the time.
I'm not sure what you meant by "spamvertising" versus
"advertising".
In my mind, the distinction would be between advertising that is kept
clearly separate from the content (banners, for example) versus
advertising that masquerades as content (pseudo-articles touting some
product, for example). I see little chance of this happening to them.
My concern is that they might take a particular political turn,
abandoning NPOV to write an encyclopedia from a particular political
point of view. There's nothing wrong with someone doing that, of
course. I fully expect some motivated Christians to someday take the
wikipedia content and "clean it up" to suit their perspective.
But it's not o.k. for wikipedia, which aims to be NPOV and a sort of
"reference standard" that others can use for such purposes.
--Jimbo