On 2 May 2017 at 18:18, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
I think that's the first time I've heard
Wikipedia described as bewitching. I'll take it as a compliment.
FWIW, I have a hard time parsing this as bad news. Someone hiring 20,000 professional
writers to create a freely accessible (though not distributable) encyclopedia is probably
a net positive for humanity. I'm sure it will be heavily biased on political issues
and heavily censored, but I doubt that will completely negate the value of the work. As an
encyclopedia buff, I hope I can be forgiven for being secretly a little bit excited to
hear about this effort. Cuba also has a state-sponsored Wikipedia competitor, EcuRed. Some
of the articles are dripping with propaganda, but it's coverage of Cuban history and
culture is actually much better than Wikipedia's (including Spanish Wikipedia). If
this gives China an excuse to permanently block Wikipedia, I suppose it will be a net
negative, but I guess we'll have to wait and see.
You are now free to tar and feather me!
I think you've hit the key point - we need this to be released under a
proper free content license :-D
(probably increasingly off topic for the dev list ... maybe see if
they have useful changes to contribute back to MW)
- d.