Magnus Manske wrote:
Vlad from the Open-site project (open-site.org), another free encyclopedia just starting, answered to my "merger" proposal. I forward this to the list for discussion.
Hello Magnus,
Another integration possibility would be code-only, it would be cool to have the same code power both projects. See http://open-site.org/code for more details.
Anyway, I hope we find the time to explore those possibilities in the future, in order to provide to the Internet community the best opened content possible.
Vlad.
I don't know that integration would be the way to go, but there is still plenty of room for co-operation. Jimbo raised some interesting points around the copyright issue. When I looked through Open-site my impression was that this whole matter has simply no been thought through. There is a copyright notice on the bottom of each page. On the help page after a routine admonition against using copyright material there is, "It's of vital importance to keep the open character of open-site, therefore we can't accept submissions that violate the copyright laws. We must pay special attention, in order not to stop the flow of information due to patents that are applied to our information." That's all there is, and I find that last sentence to be cryptic. Does this suggest that Open-site is proprietary?
They are younger project, and I see nothing in there about how they would handle such issues as NPOV and vandalism. These are bound to be perpetual problems for any open encyclopedia project.
Some of their presentation and material organization is interesting, and they to have a Rumanian language section which we don't.
Personally, I don't at this time support any kind of merger. It may in fact be healthy to have competing projects each attracting its own particular blend of contributors. On the other hand the free sharing of content and code to the benefit of both projects would be a perfectly healthy activity.
When it comes to copyright, the real problem is not going to be with people who put copyrighted material into an on-line encyclopedia. That's easily removed as soon as it's recognized. It's going to be with people who try to claim personal copyrights on openly licensed or even public domain material.
Eclecticology