On Apr 8, 2005 1:13 AM, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
Is there a way around this which doesn't require someone making the decision and choosing between pissing off half the community and pissing off half the community?
One could argue that making this, or any "version" is a distraction we, the wikipedia community, rightly should devolve to others.
Armed with a suitable tool for managing lists of versions (which, incidentally, I'd argue shouldn't be part of the database, but another program and datastore altogether) anyone can come up with an subcyclopedia (a subset of wikipedia) tailored to their target audience. So people can come up with a "world places encyclopedia", a "basic knowledge encyclopedia", a "southern baptist convention encyclopedia", whatever. As these groups have a more specific model of their target audience and the purpose of their subcyclopedia, they can pick articles that suit that.
So really I'm arguing that Wikipedia should be a supplier only of raw material, not of finished product. It will undoubtedly be orbited by related satellite wikireaders, subcyclopedias, and ambitious superprojects, but a generic "Wikipedia 1.0" seems to me to be a lot of work to produce a jack-of-all-trades product that meets no-one's needs terribly well.