[WikiEN-l] Citizendium charter ratified

[David Goodman]

This opens the question of how Citizendium would have done had it
followed the initial plan of mirroring Wikipedia for articles that had
not been rewritten by Citizendium people., and thus provided the very
broad range from the first -- along with the hopefully improved
quality of an increasing number of articles. Larry rejected this , and
perhaps it was one of the idiosyncratic decisions of his that impaired
the project.

I think it would still be possible to do this, but I wonder if it would help.

On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 4:27 AM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>  On 27/09/2010 04:13, Carcharoth wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>> There is plenty of obscure stuff that you still have to look up behind
>> paywalls, or look for specialised publications (books and journals and
>> monographs). I find myself coming across stuff like that all the time,
>> but it is true that Wikipedia is often a convenient *starting* point
>> for digging deeper. But if I don't find what I want on Wikipedia, I
>> keep looking.
> Indeed.  "Comprehensive" is important, but "inclusive of starting points
> for research" rather more so. Think of the difference between "stub" and
> "FA" in those terms and you're getting somewhere. I think CZ missed a
> trick by not getting the whole gamut.
>> Of the free (i.e. non-paywall) sources available, the
>> best for my purposes is often the book scans found at archive.org and
>> on Google Books. In theory, as anyone can access those, they will
>> eventually be used to source Wikipedia articles, but for obscure
>> subjects that will take a very long time.
> That seems not to be quite right. The recent gadget to locate our
> sources of links found Google Books at the top of the heap. My own
> researches show that Google Books is quite intensively used for
> referencing, for just such "obscure subjects". I do have my own axe to
> grind here (basically archive.org material being sent to Wikisource for
> much better presentation); but that is what takes time. Traditional
> chaos still reigns, but our purposes tend to make sense of what is out
> there.
>
> Charles
>
>
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG