[Foundation-l] Britannica became free

[Samuel Klein]

That's great.  It might be valuable to share notes on collaborations
between old-school encyclopedic media groups and Wikipedians in
various countries.  I see a few classes of collabs possible

* between traditional editing teams and Wikipedians.  These teams,
including those being laid off by brockhaus, have tremendous
history/experience/tradecraft in how to organize workflows, track
sources, follow updates year by year to a topic, and find new experts
to provide overviews and novel writing.  Generally these experts are
not paid much - IME that is not the core expense of maintaining even
traditional encyclos.  Work together to find ways to help WP benefit
from these practices -- and find a new way for lifelong encyclopedists
to continue contributing to world knowledge even as their jobs change

* between chief editors and Wikipedian masses. Reassess the merit of
"the value of an encyclopedia is what it leaves out, not what it puts
in".  what does that mean now for multimedia encyclos with multi-DVD
sets?  What did it ever mean for mega-encyclos?  How can we provide
high-quality top-level overviews while continuing to expand the
quantity & quality of detail?  How to coordinate what are effectively
focused subject-specific encyclos and WP as a whole?  how important
are the value judgements being made by each group producing a limited
edition for DVD / iPod / OLPC / print?  what audiences don't find
their needs met yet?

* between content archivists and Wikimedia : freeing archives for
public use.  There are a few degrees to this : access/reuse of
indexes, access/reuse of summaries//data templates//thumbnails,
access/reuse of full text & multimedia.  This works in two ways -- WM
can be a world leader in providing accurate and high-visibility
attribution of its sources [something the projects currently are poor
at - contribute text or media to WM and you get an almost negligible
mention].

SJ

On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 7:29 AM, Mathias Schindler
<mathias.schindler at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 12:23 AM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Do we know people at Arvato?  SJ
>
> Yes (more precisely: at Wissen Media and at InmediaOne] )
>
> Mathias
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>