On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 4:49 PM, Achille
<achille.listserv(a)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)
23. 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.
Although there are plenty of people turned-off and turned-away by the
deletion of factually correct, verifiable and referenced articles.
There is nothing quite as disheartnening as working on an article,
only for a faceless gang of self-appointed AfDers to come along and
decide that this article falls below an arbitrary threshold for
inclusion in Wikipedia. My Wikipedia experience has been significantly
soured by such arbitrary deletions and my efforts toward Wikipedia
have fallen off recently as a result.
If I knew that my work could survive at least in some form (a
publicly-viewable deletion namespace with libel and slander removed,
e.g.), perhaps I would allow myself to get more excited about working
on Wikipedia again.
--
Oldak Quill (oldakquill(a)gmail.com)