[Foundation-l] [Announcement] update in board of trustees membership

[George Herbert]

On Dec 17, 2007 3:57 PM, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 17/12/2007, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > Citizendium's small but not hurting for participants. They'll be fine.
> >
> > That's not my point here. There is a certain number of people in this
> > world who are going to be interested in actually "writing" an
> > encyclopedia (as opposed to the people who are happy to edit, revise,
> > or do other things to support the writing community).
>
> Isn't one of the major lessons we've learned from the past six years
> of Wikipedia (seven now, I guess) that the number of people in the
> world interested in writing an encyclopedia is a lot bigger than we
> ever anticipated it being?
>
> > The one-author, one-page idea (from what I've heard knol is supposed
> > to be) sounds like a disaster waiting to happen
>
> Yes and no. It's workable, *if* there are other caveats which haven't
> been announced yet - some kind of weighting, structuring, etc. We
> shall see.
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk

This is already completely possible to do without any central
structure at all... there are billions of informational web pages with
single author control up, including many educational or encyclopedic
type ones.

The question is indexing and quality control and interlinking and so forth.

Wikipedia solved a whole bunch of problems, from the technology to HCI
to structuring a project attractive to contributors (which, despite
the voluminous criticisms, is still clearly true today).

Google has not to my knowledge announced how they intend to address
those issues for Knol.

If it's "like Wikipedia but with WP:OWN as a default state rather than
policy against it" then I don't know how that helps the quality
control issue which the community does rather nicely for WP.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com