--- Larry Sanger lsanger@nupedia.com wrote:
On Sun, 1 Sep 2002, Stephen Gilbert wrote:
--- Karl Juhnke yangfuli@yahoo.com wrote:
First let me reiterate what I think you are saying, so if I am again missing the point, at least you will know what I am responding to. You want to have some articles taken out of the domain of the collectively editable, and put into a space (say ExpertWikipedia) where they are maintained exclusively by some expert or experts.
No, not quite. He said that Wikipedia should remain *unchanged*. The articles would be copied, not moved.
And, moreover, I'm bewildered at the suggestion that what I was proposing was a "fork."
OK, now it is my turn to be bewildered. I went back and re-read both of your previous long e-mails, and I still don't understand what you are suggesting. Sorry for being so dense.
You speak of "a free encyclopedia project advisory board of some sort, made up of leaders in all fields, that would set standards and procedures for the selection of *some free articles* (not to lead Wikipedia)." So your proposal is to have a one-way flow of information? That is to say, some subset of Wikipedia articles would be deemed of acceptable quality, and copied exactly as they are to some place where they would be safe from further editing? (By the way, what happens to all the broken links if only a subset of articles is copied over?)
If this is what you are suggesting, then you are counting on Wikipedia as it is now, prior to any contributions and revisions of your panel of experts, to produce the quality articles, among which the experts merely pick and choose the best.
But then you also say "In many more cases, [...] no one but an expert will be able to edit, supervise, and otherwise whip into shape articles on subjects that many nonexperts think, but mistakenly, they can write adequately about." So you obviously don't envision the experts merely selecting articles, right? They will be expected to actively edit articles too.
Where do you envision the experts doing their editorial work? Will they contribute to Wikipedia for a while, and then when an article becomes good enough, copy it over to a safe haven? Yet you contend that most experts could not be induced to be active on Wikipedia itself. If that is true, then they must be doing their editing someplace else. If they are doing their editing someplace else, how does the information get back to Wikipedia? Whatever appears in the safe haven will have all the benefits of expert attention, but the Wikipedia article won't have those benefits. If the information starts at Wikipedia, is modified and improved, and those improvements don't get back to Wikipedia, then the project has forked. That's how I came to the shocking conclusion that you wanted to fork Wikipedia.
Finally, I did visit http://www.nupeida.com/, and as near as I can tell the content there is not static, and thus not a safe haven as I have been using the term. Even if something were copied over to Nupedia exactly as it is on Wikipedia, it might then evolve and be improved in its Nupedia incarnation. Again, that's a fork. Yes, historically Wikipedia was a fork of Nupedia, but whichever way a fork goes, the free software movement gives us strong reason to believe only one branch will survive.
Forgive me for not comprehending your proposal, and please believe that I am not being intentionally obtuse. I simply don't understand the mechanism of what your panel of experts would do and how. I, too, would like to "create a structure that will make the elite feel welcome to be involved in a *leadership* role", but I don't see what you think that entails.
Apologetically yours, -Karl
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