Re: [WikiEN-l] Nupedia?

Daniel- That does not seem like a valid analogy to me. Wikipedia is neither user- hostile nor is it, like a free software application, an isolated piece of code that someone else needs to put together with other pieces of code. Wikipedia *is* a distribution of articles, it *has* a structure, it is easy to use. I've never heard anyone complain that they don't know how to read Wikipedia. It's not the Linux kernel. And where Wikipedia has usability deficits - it does - we should work to correct them instead of trying to attract people to a more user-friendly read-only version. And we should confirm this irrational fear by pointing them to a separate website? This would be very unfair. We should give people an opportunity to learn. Wikipedia's success is based on overcoming these kinds of fears. One way to do that is to create a safe vector of entry on the regular Wikipedia, and to promote it prominently as such. What is now just an inconspicuous link on the Main Page -- Brilliant Prose -- could eventually be developed into its own navigational structure within Wikipedia, a structure which allows people to easily absorb the wiki experience while alleviating their initial fears. Look at what you're saying: "Many people .. will not trust anything on a wiki". A *wiki*? Most people have no clue what a wiki is in the first place, and the few who do have an idea got it in the last couple of years. We can *define* what a wiki is. We can *make* people trust us. On the Wikipedia Main Page, there are two big rectangles, a light blue one and a light yellow one. The blue one has the title "encyclopedia", the yellow one has the title "community". The Wikipedia project is both, and that is a good thing. We are a learning resource, and we should work to find ways to make that learning resource more reliable and trustworthy -- hence this discussion. We are also a knowledge community where people go to share their wisdom and ideas with others, to philosophize, to argue and to ask questions. Pages like [[Wikipedia:Reference desk]] come to mind, which is open for questions from everyone, like a library help desk. But also the countless debates on talk pages, which invite everyone to participate in intellectual discourse. If we try to grow in one area at the expense of the other, we will lose. We need to nurture the mutually beneficial relationship between encyclopedia and community, not undermine it. With a separate "stable" website, there will be questions like: What are we going to promote -- contributing or reading? What are we going to do about negative perceptions of Wikipedia -- correct them, or ignore them to promote Nupedia? This is a path of self-destruction. There should be no artificial limits of our growth. That doesn't mean we cannot work to make each aricle better, little by little.. There is nothing wrong with always having a 10%/90% relationship between high quality pages and works in progress. There is also no fundamental difference between creating and improving content. Growing our community benefits both. And any systematic effort to focus on improvement over growth is not hindered by constantly recruiting new editors. "We are the info-elite, the ones who create and improve. The unwashed masses can only consume. We must engineer a website that is useful for these troglodytes to avoid confusing them with possibilities that their feeble little brains will never understand!" ;-) Let's be careful with assumptions about what people want or do not want. Of course we should provide an easy interface for reading our articles, and of course we should do everything we can to improve the quality and reliability of Wikipedia. We should not pander to irrational fears, however, at the expense of growing both our community and our encyclopedia. Wikipedia works because it's made of people. Separating the people from the content they create is not a good idea. Regards, Erik