Delirium wrote:
From this and another of your posts that suggested 'retail' (or was that someone else's post?) am I right in inferring that WP1.0 is something along the lines of the "Sifter" project that was proposed earlier?
The way I think about it is that 1.0 is a particular result, while "Sifter" is one proposal for how to to get there, and not necessarily the only one.
I have a number of ideas about 1.0, ideas that need to be subjected to community scrutiny and analysis before we actually do anything. But here's a thumbnail sketch. Remember that these are ideas about 1.0, not ideas about how we should get there:
1. "Wikipedia 1.0 is about as good as Britannica" -- better in some areas, not as good in some other areas. But reasonably complete, and highly reliable.
2. "Wiki is not paper, but Wikipedia 1.0 is paper". The goal of a push towards 1.0 is specifically to produce a version that's purposefully edited and limited in some minor ways. We use 'Wiki is not paper' as a good reason to be permissive about the addition of relative obscurities, but we hope for a print publisher to pick up Wikipedia 1.0 and distribute it profitably and dirt-cheap to all the people of the world, which means paper and which means constraints.
3. "Wikipedia 1.0 is *just* Wikipedia 1.0" -- this is to remind us that this is just a 1.0 release, and so it won't be mature in every way, and that the mistakes we will inevitably make in 1.0 will be rectified in 1.2, 1.4, 2.0, 3.0 and beyond. We'll need to set some policies for 1.0, and then stick to them until we release, but after that, we can and should open the whole thing up to critical reflection for the next round.
I also have some ideas about the Wikipedia 1.0 (or "Sifter") process...
1. The process should unite and energize the existing Wikipedia community, not compete with it. Example: this should not happen on a different website by new volunteers, but by us, we've earned it.
2. The process should not interfere with the miracle that is Wikipedia. Example: no one should think that we're going to close the process of Wikipedia itself.
3. The process should be as open as possible, more open than anyone before us could have imagined possible, but only as open as is consistent with our goals. Example: since Wikipedia 1.0 is paper, we may have to be more strict about letting unknown people randomly do things relating to sifting.
Part of the advantage of Britannica is that you can be reasonably sure that when you read an article that states a fact, that fact is correct, or at least at the time of publication was believed to be correct by the experts in the field (no one can account for future discoveries, of course). If it is intended to rival Britannica, WP1.0 will have to have a similar level of reliability -- when it says someone was born on January 7, 1845, they better have actually been born on that date -- not, say, January 7, 1854. And when something is mentioned as a mainstream physics topic, it had better actually be one, not a fringe theory.
That's to be hoped, yes. How to get there is a different thing from saying that we do, in fact, want to get there.
--Jimbo