On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 4:49 PM, Achille achille.listserv@gmail.com wrote:
The Price we pay from the Deletionists: Paul Graham's Y-Combinator is actively looking to fund Wikipedia-like startup that does away with them.
See: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html (Ideas we are looking to sponsor)
- More open alternatives to Wikipedia. Deletionists rule Wikipedia. Ironically, they're constrained by print-era thinking. What harm does it do if an online reference has a long tail of articles that are only interesting to a few people, so long as everyone can still find whatever they're looking for? There is room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica.
On that note, why don't we enable access to deleted content ? It's already there, we can just dump them nightly into a big file.
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"Wikipedia minus what quality control it manages to have" does not sound like an attractive alternative to me, nor something I would use in place of Wikipedia, but right to fork is inherent in all free projects. If someone feels that such a project would be valuable, they have every right to take a database dump and go in whatever direction they want with it. I don't personally foresee its success, but I could be wrong. If it is successful, more power to it, if not, then so be it.
If I were looking at possible alternatives, I would say an alternative with -better- quality control would be more likely to succeed than something with less.