Lars Aronsson wrote:
Instead of thinking of (the English) Wikipedia as a basket of 850,000 articles in their current version, we can think of it as a basket of X million article-versions. Every article-version in this collection of X million is free under GFDL, and can be used as the basis for new article-versions. Anybody can add new article-versions to the collection.
Oh, I *like* that.
Currently Wikipedia works under the assumption that the latest version of any article is the best one, and the only one that should be linked from other articles, shown to the public and indexed by search engines. It is important that we realize that this *is* an assumption, it does represent a design choice, and not necessarily the optimal one. If I'm compiling a Wikireader or a similar subset of articles, I might pick my article-versions under very different assumptions.
I agree.
I'm surprised that Wikipedia mirrors such as Answers.com don't work more like Wikireaders, where a human editor picks useful article-versions and leaves the stubs unmirrored. The added value from such an "editor's choice" would be a perfectly valid business model.
Indeed!
- d.