On 12/22/05, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
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.
You'd have to spend a whole lot of money to get human editors to pick the "useful articles". It might pay off in the really long term, but it'd require a huge investment. And due to the GFDL some other company could just come along and take the results of that huge investment and drive you out of business anyway. I'm not at all surprised no one is doing it.
It's enough of a value add to present a page with results from multiple different sources, organized without all the editing tools and other extraneous things useful only for editing. It's enough of a filter to just leave out article versions which were reverted within 5 minutes (or some other determined time period). Until recently the mirrors tended to perform faster as well.
When I want to read Wikipedia, I go to the mirrors, not to wikipedia.org. Wikipedia just doesn't do a very good job of distributing its product, and it wastes millions of dollars of donation money trying.
This is not to knock the Wikipedia, which does a great job of producing articles. I don't think you'll ever be able to cater to readers and editors on the same site though (although to some extent that comes down to a semantics question of what would be considered "the same site").
Anthony