From: David Levinson dlevinson@mn.rr.com Sign me up (I have Ph.D. Civil Engineering and teach transportation engineering, planning, and policy)

Great!

It should not go under the name nupedia, nor should it go under the name wikipedia, but something else. According to network solutions metapedia.com is owned, but metapedia.org and metapedia.net are available. Hyperpedia.org is also a good name and available.

We clearly need Jimbo to reply on this point. I've got a few name ideas myself.

We might want to think about an updating protocol, as wikipedia articles evolve past the frozen versions, some sort of flagging would be in order of articles that diverged significantly from frozen articles and the "liquid" wikipedia open to edits.

Definitely--I'm sure that sort of feature will be one of the first to be added.

We might also want to think about allowing multiple groups be able to "publish" "frozen" versions at the touch of a button (sort of combination of Larry and Ed's idea). Any individual/group, once registered, would be able to touch a button and establish a flag on a wikipedia article. Thus in Frozen version A, the academics might have a tight standard and only review/update once in a blue moon, but another group B could freeze a different version and update more frequently. Since these are only article flags on particular versions (all of which are stored in a single database), there would not be forking as such. However someone could search only for group A. Group A would have their own web interface (own name, own address). If someone else didn't like group A's cut (too small, too elite, too whatever), they could publish their own take on the encyclopedia.

It would allow someone potentially to be using wikipedia to publish a non-NPOV encyclopedia, since versions in the middle of edit wars would be freezable by a particular group - but as long as that was somehow acknowledged, and the lines between liquid wikipedia and frozen wikipedia (versions A, B, ...) were established, I think it could be tolerated.

I think this is a *great* idea. I can easily see how the encyclopedia filter software could become more popular that PediaWiki itself. It's essentially a way to import articles from Wikipedia (or, theoretically, any PediaWiki website).

Of course, the only drawback is that "reviewing" efforts might be spread too thinly; but somehow I doubt that will be a problem.

The issues of interlinking - linking to a "liquid" article would need to be addressed either by identifying it as external link, removing that link in the "frozen" version, or as some third kind of link. However, this raises questions of self-containment.

Exactly right. That setting should probably be left open to the reader. Then we could debate about what the default setting should be.

Larry