Karl Juhnke wrote:
Suppose a group of people wanted to build a specialized
encyclopedia
for their own purposes, and decided to create it on Wikipedia so they
don't have to worry about hosting or software issues. Suppose they saw
Wikipedia as a free collaboration tool, and although they didn't mind
releasing their work under the GFDL, they weren't specifically
interested in creating a _general purpose_ encyclopedia.
Would this group of people and their project be welcome?
Yes
Specifically, suppose that the Mennonite Historical
Society of Canada
http://www.mhsc.ca/
decided that their 2000-article On-line Canadian Mennonite Encyclopedia
was significantly out of date, and that an efficient way to collaborate
on getting it updated would be to pipe it into Wikipedia and work on it
from there. As an added bonus to them, their articles would start
getting high rankings from Google.
These would certainly be benefits for them.
I must stress the hypothetical nature of this question.
I have no
reason to believe that MHSC is willing to release their work under the
GFDL, or that they are interested in collaborating by using Wikipedia
as a free platform. But supposing they were willing and interested,
would we want them to?
I appreciate that your point is only testing the waters.
* Would we want lengthy and expert contributions to
current articles on
Conrad Grebel, George Blaurock, and Mennonite theology?
* Would we want short biographies of notable modern Canadian
Mennonites?
* Would it be a nuisance and a waste of space to have a separate
article for every Mennonite congregation in Canada?
* Would we be embarrassed if there were more information in Wikipedia
about the Mennonite faith than about any other religion?
I see no difficulty with any of this. It's all encyclopedic. If
anything, this should serve as an incentive for other groups to get
their act in gear. No group should be held back just because others
fail to support their own beliefs. That would be reducing Wikipedia to
the lowest common denominator.
Reatreating from the specific question into
generalities, I can imagine
several cases where groups have a set of information, objective and
encyclopedic in nature, which they want to disseminate for reasons of
their own. I can imagine those groups looking to Wikipedia as a free
tool towards their ends, and seeing the GFDL as a reasonable license to
sign off on in exchange for the privilege.
* Have there already been cases of piggybacking?
* Has the community reached any sort of consensus opinion towards
piggybackers?
* If not, does anyone else anticipate that this will become an issue in
the future?
Over a year ago there was a similar discussion with the Marxists, who
have an extensive database of their own. Although these two groups are
philosophically very different, the situations are quite similar. It's
not a question of whether we can handle them, but of whether they can
handle us. They, like the Marxists, could find the wide-open editing
and NPOV very hard to take. Faced with some of our more opinionated
memberz in an edit war they would probably just go away.
Ec