Hi Larry,
Not that I speak for Jimbo of course, but this might be misleading, Lars. [...] Again, this is misleading on a number of points. First of [...] Again, Lars, you misleadingly imply something that makes [...] This is ridiculous, for reasons above stated. I'm certain
I don't know why, but your words sound hard to me, and they sounded hard last year when you backed them up by being the official editor. I might have misunderstood all of this, and I could blame it all on the fact that English is not my native language, but the factual consequence is that I went away and started my own project because of this. I simply cannot see how much energy I would have had to spend trying to get to terms with you, energy that I now saved by staying out of your way.
Still I have the deepest respect and gratitude for your starting Wikipedia, the first successful project to create a free encyclopedia. I am very careful to point this out in my paper that I'm presenting in Karlovy Vary next month, http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/elpub02/ http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/elpub02/abstracts/G_04.htm
We agree completely that wiki is very useful.
We disagree on the need for a license and strict policy. Wikipedia has GFDL and takes *pride* in being *only* an encyclopedia and *not* being a dictionary, a joke book and what not. Susning.nu has no license policy, and very few ask for it. And operating in the much smaller Swedish language environment (there is no about.com in Swedish, and no amazon.com or imdb.com full of book and film reviews), Susning.nu is *proud* to be *both* an encyclopedia, a dictionary, a hacker jargon dictionary, a consumer's guide to various products and services, a link guide, and pretty much anything that the users make it to be. There never was any discussion of what is suitable and what is not. The most recent addition is a number of terms from slang people use only when they are drunk, not very far from Jimmy's joke book.
You recently expressed a view something along the lines that a real encyclopedia cannot be built entirely with amateurs, but also needs the input from serious scholars (sorry if I'm quouting this wrong). Your conclusion is that these people must be found and encouraged to join the Wikipedia project. I think that I agree with your assessment but my conclusion is different: Susning.nu continues to work with the people who wants to use it for fun, and might never become a fully functional encyclopedia.
All these differences should be perfectly OK: Two different projects with different goals and methods. Still, the articles on Susning.nu are far better than those on the Swedish Wikipedia.
This is a problem for the Swedish Wikipedia, and it illustrates a potential similar problem for any non-English Wikipedia: Should policy be relaxed (down to the Susning.nu level) in order to include more uses, and more users? Or should the policy be kept strict and centralized at the risk of excluding contents, uses, and users? Overly strict policy is what Nupedia suffered from. A relaxation of the policy for, say, the Bulgarian Wikipedia might mislead users to believe that the same is OK in the English or Russian Wikipedia. This could erode the value of the Wikipedia brand. If policy is relaxed for one language, the name Wikipedia might no longer be globally associated with quality and seriousity. I think this illustrates that policy issues can be as important as GFDL licensing to assure compatibility between projects.
As far as I can see, Enciclopedia Libre is still fully compatible with Wikipedia, while Susning.nu probably is not.