[WikiEN-l] Citizendium on quality

[David Gerard]

On 21/12/2007, Monahon, Peter B. <Peter.Monahon at uspto.gov> wrote:

> The whole point of Wikipedia was trusting another source than academia,
> so-called authority, and so-called stability!  People who say "it can't
> go into Wikipedia unless it's been published somewhere else first" drive
> me crazy - it's not "Book-report-a-pedia".  Like the scene at the
> beginning of Stargate (where he corrects the translation of hieroglyphs
> saying "that textbook is wrong, but everyone still uses it anyway"), all
> those mindsets are doing is re-perpetuating the supremacy of the
> pedantic (and wrong) decisions of dead writers and dead publishers.
> Please leave them buried.  Please bring life to Wikipedia.  Wikipedia
> was supposed to breathe NEW LIFE into knowledge pooling, not just be a
> collective (ces)pool of the dead.


It depends who you ask. As far as I understood it, that it was meant
to produce an encyclopedia was the only definition. Producing a
stable, fixed, *paper* version was certainly being actively pursued in
mid-2004.

While it may well have the potential to be much more than that, it's
simply factually incorrect to state that this was "the whole point."


- d.