Daniel Mayer wrote:
Ulrich Fuchs wrote:
With an "official" cannibalization of Wikipedia arcticles for Nupedia articles there would be no content - people do not like it to write without being acknowledged.
What are you talking about? By law the Nupedia article would have to give full credit to Wikipedia and have a link back. Our content is already being used in many, many other places as well - this is not cannibalism. That is the whole point of the GNU FDL - re-usability of the text.
I think what Ulrich is most worried about is he doesn't want a stable encyclopedia to be a fork. This can be easily avoid by puting a link to the current Wikipedia article on hte Nupedia version, labeled "Edit the latest version of this article".
Stephen G. ------- Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia http://www.wikipedia.org
on 7/28/03 10:08 AM, sgilbert@nbnet.nb.ca at sgilbert@nbnet.nb.ca wrote:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
Ulrich Fuchs wrote:
With an "official" cannibalization of Wikipedia arcticles for Nupedia articles there would be no content - people do not like it to write without being acknowledged.
What are you talking about? By law the Nupedia article would have to give full credit to Wikipedia and have a link back. Our content is already being used in many, many other places as well - this is not cannibalism. That is the whole point of the GNU FDL - re-usability of the text.
I think what Ulrich is most worried about is he doesn't want a stable encyclopedia to be a fork. This can be easily avoid by puting a link to the current Wikipedia article on hte Nupedia version, labeled "Edit the latest version of this article".
Stephen G.
Perhaps "Compare the latest version of this article"
Our articles do go downhill from time to time, but generally get better and more detailed. But perhaps too detailed from time to time. With a deal like this you need to check every month or so and see what's happening with the article and if it is better bring it over to the stable version.
Fred Bauder
I think what Ulrich is most worried about is he doesn't want a stable encyclopedia to be a fork. This can be easily avoid by puting a link to the current Wikipedia article on hte Nupedia version, labeled "Edit the latest version of this article".
Actually, that's not at all what I'm worried about. ;-)
What I'm most worried about is that Wikipedia will lose contributors, because most of them won't get a choice to decide what's in the "real" encyclopedia and therefore lose interest. The closer (the more "officially") Nupedia is associated with Wikipedia, the less interesting it will be to spend time for Wikipedia, because everything one is doing there is just the "foreplay" for the "real thing" Nupedia.
I admit that I have my personal problems with the Nupedia editing policy, and the way authors are treated there as more or less irrelevant (because the important persons aren't the authors, but the almighty editors). I once offered two ready 2 page articles on "Sauna" and "Sherry" for the Nupedia project. I got an awnser like this (I'm exaggerating here, to make my point clear): "It's nice, thank you, but can you please strip it down to one paragraph, then we will consider to put it in the editing process as soon as we've found an editor suitable to the subject". Guess what? I never thought of Nupedia any more, and I never heard of them, too. I doubt if Nupedia (if revived and taking [[Sauna]] and [[Sherry]] from the Wikipedia will ever be able to find someone (or even a group of people!) with a university degree in either Saunology or Sherryology that is willing to work for free and will "approve" those two articles.
But now back to the subject: Imagine what would happen if the title page of Wikipedia wouldn't say any longer: "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia", but instead:
"Welcome to Wikipedia, here you can upload articles that probably will go into the free Nupedia encyclopaedia editing process some day if the people there like it and have the right approved editors for your subject".
Again - If Nupedia wants to use Wikipedia articles (forking them or not) - they're free to do it, the License perfectly allows for that. Just go ahead and do it - there will be enough Wikipedia editors merging back the approved articles to Wikipedia, both will profit from that. (However I'd like to see how that's going to work with that silly GNU FDL requesting to cite all the history. Merging a history from Nupedia and one from Wikipedia in the Wikipedia talk page (where else?) must be fun!)
But I strongly oppose the Wikipedia *supporting* that in any further way. It's like shooting ourselfs in the knee (is that a valid phrase in english?). Apart from that, there are some problems at Wikipedia that should be adressed by developers first (performance, searching, just two name a few.) I don't see a reason why one should spend development time to make Wikipedia suit for the Nupedia editing process.
Uli
What I'm most worried about is that Wikipedia will lose contributors, because most of them won't get a choice to decide what's in the "real" encyclopedia and therefore lose interest. The closer (the more "officially") Nupedia is associated with Wikipedia, the less interesting it will be to spend time for Wikipedia, because everything one is doing there is just the "foreplay" for the "real thing" Nupedia.
This might be fixed if there's some more automated way of adding articles to the 'stable' version of the encyclopedia. All potential solutions require more software, but there's a number of them (which is better I'm not sure yet). One of the many would be to have a process similar to the way Debian's distribution works (with regards to 'testing' vs. 'unstable') -- all revisions articles automatically get promoted to the stable version after some period of time (a week? two weeks?), unless someone marks it as "not ready for stable". Then presumably there could be some process by which either that mark can be removed, or it can be overridden by a consensus of everyone else.
But really I think something more automated like this is necessary, because I don't think the Brilliant Prose page is every going to have 15,000 articles on it, and even if it does, will be impossible to keep up to date.
-Mark
Responding to my own suggestion:
This might be fixed if there's some more automated way of adding articles to the 'stable' version of the encyclopedia. All potential solutions require more software, but there's a number of them (which is better I'm not sure yet). One of the many would be to have a process similar to the way Debian's distribution works (with regards to 'testing' vs. 'unstable') -- all revisions articles automatically get promoted to the stable version after some period of time (a week? two weeks?), unless someone marks it as "not ready for stable". Then presumably there could be some process by which either that mark can be removed, or it can be overridden by a consensus of everyone else.
After thinking about it a bit more, I think this may too easily lead to stuff slipping through into the 'stable' version that isn't really any good. I still think it should be easy to add stuff to the stable version though, especially simple non-controversial stuff, so perhaps a better approach would be to automatically add stuff after a certain period if at least one person other than the author has marked it good, and nobody has marked it "not ready for stable" (with appropriate manual dispute resolution, as always).
I think in general my conception of a 'stable' wikipedia is a bit different than the others being proposed. I'm hoping for a stable version that is fairly well in sync with the main Wikipedia, only being about two weeks behind most of the time, but omitting stuff currently in the midst of a major revision or edit war, not having vandalism, and also omitting stuff that's been submitted but not checked and cleaned up (bold the title and whatnot) yet. Some other people seem to be suggesting something more like Nupedia, where only really great top-quality articles are included, which I'd agree isn't necessarily the best use of our efforts.
-Mark
on 7/28/03 11:36 AM, Ulrich Fuchs at mail@ulrich-fuchs.de wrote:
It's like shooting ourselfs in the knee (is that a valid phrase in english?).
We "shoot ourselves in the foot"
Fred Bauder
Fred Bauder wrote:
on 7/28/03 11:36 AM, Ulrich Fuchs at mail@ulrich-fuchs.de wrote:
It's like shooting ourselfs in the knee (is that a valid phrase in english?).
We "shoot ourselves in the foot"
In this case though, "shooting oneself in the knee" is remarkably apt, because a shot in the knee is usually much more serious than one in the foot...
Stan
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