From: "Jimmy Wales" jwales@bomis.com
Gareth Owen wrote:
Optim optim81@yahoo.co.uk writes:
Do you think it's true?
No. I've seen no evidence of this process.
Still, I think there is something to it, and I have strong doubts that a wiki or similarly "wide-open" collaborative process could produce a great novel or play or poem.
An encyclopedia is particularly well suited to the wiki process, because it isn't really _supposed_ to be individualistic in that way. _Greatness_ for an encyclopedia article involves a pretty healthy dose of "averaging" as one of it's essential components.
Britannica sells a delightful volume of classic articles, many written by prominent people with an axe to grind. They're great essays, but as encyclopedia articles, to my mind they fall short significantly of the kind of neutrality that we're so good at.
This brings up an interesting point regarding copyright. If the content is so generic as just to be knowledge then it is not really copyrightable as it would fall in the public domain.
This would also mean that the copyright claim is so weak that very liberal fair use could be made of Wikipedia.
So you don't even have to worry about the GFDL and its adaption to the Wiki process as broad fair use and a large dose of public domain knowledge means it is very hard to infringe on Wikipedia to begin with.
Perhaps once could even go so far as to suggest that the perfect NPOV article cannot have a copyright as it is so objective that there is no personal expressiveness in it, it is a conglomeration only of knowledge.
Alex R. (en:user:alex756)