--- Larry Sanger lsanger@nupedia.com wrote:
On Fri, 25 Oct 2002, Stephen Gilbert wrote:
No one on MeatballWiki tries to define the values
of a
community. It is, however, a group of people who analyze, discuss and build online communities.
Many of
them are experts in this area.
"Experts"? There are no experts in this area. Or, if there are, all of us are.
That's an odd statement. There's no Ph.Ds, for certain. But there are people who have years of experience building, and failing to build, online communities. I humbly submit that they have far more expertise then you or I in this area (unless, of course, you have more experience at this than I'm aware of).
Learning from what others have done (and not done)
is not the same as
looking to others to define Wikipedia.
I agree with that, but asking us to go to MeatballWiki to learn the terms of the debate is a bit much. I have limited time for Wikipedia. If you want to introduce a new term from MeatballWiki, together with all the values that it implies, then by all means do so--but do so *here*, on this list.
Absolutely.
There's a rich history from older wiki communities
and projects that
we can, and should, draw upon, just as we draw
upon existing sources
for encyclopedia articles.
Maybe. I'm not actually sure that that's true; Wikipedia is a completely new thing. It's a wiki, but it's a lot more than a wiki.
Perhaps, but we're still building on a foundation that's largely wiki, and many of our problems have also been faced by other wikis.
There are lots of other sources to learn from too: older encyclopedia projects (why did they fail?), commercial encyclopedias (is there anything we can leverage from them in our project?) and the rise(s) and fall(s) of other great Internet experiments (Usenet, Slashdot).
Ok, I'll stop before I veer too far off inanother direction. It's just I sometimes feel that we don't use these sources knowledge available to us. Of course, we're all busy, and there's only so much we can do at once. Talking about the project should never replace working on it.
OK, now I really *am* done for today. Larry
I know the feeling. It's 2:00 am in my part of the world. Goodnight...
Stephen G.
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