[WikiEN-l] The Economist on "notability"

[Bryan Derksen]

David Goodman wrote:
> Of course we have a responsibility to the web. we are writing an
> encyclopedia for use.

No, not quite. The Wikipedia that you see on the web is not our product, 
that's our working area. It's there first and foremost for editors. The 
fact that general readers also find it useful is a happy coincidence 
since that's how we draw most of our new editors in.

The product of Wikipedia is our database. If all we cared about was 
publishing an online encyclopedia we wouldn't need the GFDL or other 
open licence, we wouldn't need to worry about keeping the licensing 
consistent and compatible, we could just say "by posting your work here 
you're granting us the right to display it on Wikimedia" or somesuch. 
There are already tons of other user-generated sites out there with 
similar ad-hoc licensing that don't care about ease of reuse.

No, our most important target audience for re-use are people and 
organizations like those found on 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks>, or anyone 
else who wishes to build something out of the resource we make 
available, big or small. Some day Wikipedia-the-project will be defunct 
(or evolve into something completely different) and the database will be 
what we leave behind for our successors to pick up and use or work with.

Label and categorize things, sure. Many mirrors and forks will likely be 
interested only in a subset of our content and this sort of labeling 
will allow them to cull that out more easily. But it makes no sense to 
cull out cull out topics for them ahead of time because we don't know 
what they'll be interested in. Maybe someone down the road will want to 
make the Encyclopedia Pokemonia, or set up a competitor for IMDB that 
focuses on TV shows, or whatever, and they could have used Wikipedia's 
articles for that.

> The web context we work in is aware of other browsers and other web
> services. We arent making a new system from scratch, we work in that
> environment, and we need to pay attention to how we are used and we
> need to have respect for those who depend upon us. No large
> information system on the web can operate in isolation from google.

Sure it can. If Google were to decide tomorrow to exclude Wikipedia from 
their search results entirely we wouldn't close shop and shut down.

I personally don't use Google very much any more for searching for 
general information, I have a Wikipedia search installed in my browser's 
search bar to go there directly. IIRC Firefox 3 is going to be 
distributed with Wikipedia as one of the default searches pre-installed. 
Not to mention the traffic we get from direct links people post on their 
own external web sites, and from the other various search engines still 
out there. Google's handy but we don't really need it.

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