Hi,
Le Thursday 23 September 2004 19:54, Brion Vibber a écrit :
On Sep 23, 2004, at 1:42 AM, Yann Forget wrote:
Le Thursday 23 September 2004 03:26, Brion Vibber a écrit :
Certainly we could give them a stripped dump in that timeframe, but I think they'd be wasting a lot of money pressing it to disc in that state. I can't support this as described.
Is Wikipedia that bad? ;o) No I don't think so. There are obviously many stubs, incomplete articles and so on, but still I think that it is a valuable pice of work. Or so I was told. ;o)
Wikipedia is a very valuable resource, but it's a *dynamic* one. If you're going to throw away the advantages of our process, you'd better have something else to fall back on.
There's a *lot* of crud in general. There will be mistakes. There will be falsehoods. There will be 'FUCKFUCKFUCK' vandalism. And in six months when they go to press, the Wikipedia on the web will be much improved -- but every mistake in their published copy will be preserved indelibly and it's us, not Mandrake, who's going to get the bad press over it.
Really I don't think so. We will need proper notice about what is Wikipedia, how it is built, and we will have a link on each article with a mention "see the updated version online". So users will be able to update articles whenever they like it.
You will say, "What the use to have a DVD if I can see the article online." Well if you have a 56K connection, there is a big difference between updating a few articles about current events (Irak, US elections, etc.) and getting a whole encylopedia with a total of 4 GB. Anyway, the biography of Einstein won't be very different in 6 months time, so it doesn't matter to upgrade it, but the article about the next US elections will.
People buying the Mandrake Linux distribution will get Wikipedia as a bonus. So even if you don't have an Internet connection, it's better to have a free but not perfect 6-month-old encyclopedia than nothing. Seing than commercial encyclopedias are usually several years late and are far to be cheap, it will be quite good.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Yann