[WikiEN-l] Re: Selecting content of print version

[Ray Saintonge]

Geoff Burling wrote:

>On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>>dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:
>>
>[snip]
>
>>>Thought number 2: regardless of the legal defensibility of the use
>>>of some other encyclopedia's list of articles as a guideline for
>>>shaping Wikipedia's, it strikes me as being intellectually lazy
>>>and a bit dishonest. If we claim to be producing an encyclopedia,
>>>and do not have any other way of knowing what should be in it other
>>>than to compare its contents with some other encyclopedia, we're
>>>certainly leeching off of someone else's work, regardless of
>>>whether or not they can conduct a successful lawsuit over the matter.
>>>
>>But we do have other ways, which will point to other exclusions.  Why
>>not use them all, including Columbia?  This does not imply that we will
>>have the same contents.
>>
>Did I miss something -- or more likely, misspeak myself? I thought this
>exercise was simply to find out where Wikipedia's coverage was unacceptably
>thin & ask our contributors to focus on those holes.
>
Not at all, but I can't say that of some of the others.  I read it 
exactly as you say, and thought it was a good idea.  Some of our 
brilliant colleagues took it as an introduction to the topic of 
copyright violation.

>And my comment in an earlier email about Columbia's boast of an article for
>every proper noun from the Bible seems to have taken on a life of its own.
>
We should have been making our boasts two years ago, rather than letting 
Easton take the blame..

>I'd only be worried if the _Print_ Wikipedia had that; & frankly speaking,
>if the editor of the Print version was faced with choosing whether to
>include the name of a personage who appears once or twice in the Old
>Testament & is known only to the most serious Rabbinical students & their
>Christian equivalents at the seminary, or to ensure that there is an
>article for every president of Venzuela, I would vote for the latter.
>
Some of these personages are so far down in the begats that one wonders 
if they might have been misbegotten.  If we claimed that one of them had 
been President of Venezuela, who would notice?

>Further, even if after this research we learned where Wikipedia was
>unaccepably thin, we can decide not to address any of these weaknesses.
>if I may fall back on my credentials (I have a BA in English), I wouldn't
>lose sleep if Print Wikipedia failed to have an article on John Skelton,
>a 15th century English poet. Thumbing through my copy of _The Norton
>Anthology of English Poetry_, I can easily find a dozen names that I
>would trade to ensure that Wikipedia could boast, say, a complete listing
>of all of the common songbirds in Australia.
>
Red Skelton would mean more to some readers than John Skelton.

>What will happen with the Print Wikipedia (unless Jimbo has negotiated
>some special deal) is that the publisher will take a snapshot of Wikipedia,
>extract some 30,000-50,000 articles, subject them to copy-editting &
>legal review (e.g., finding every mention of "Kyle is a fag" & removing
>it), then publish it. Completing even a few hundred stubs would burn up
>the savings any publisher hoped to realize from reprinting an existing
>source.
>
I hope they're not waiting for us to do it.

>I've complained elsewhere that all we do on Wikien-l is talk endlessly
>about things. I feel that a small group needs to be selected to address
>this project, & do the required work to bring it off. Or at least let's
>create another mailling list to discuss this, so that Wikien-l can go
>back to talking incomclusively about things like who needs to be banned,
>& the endless edit wars about the proper names for Eastern European rivers
>& cities, & Middle Eastern topics.
>
These are great subjects for some people to show how brilliant their 
ignorance really is.  

I completely sympathize with this point.  If a print edition is going to 
be a reality, which I hope it will, people will need to make decisions 
about it.  Excuse me if I appear cynical about that prospect.

Ec