[Wikipedia-l] Marxists.org - seems to be some good material there

[Robert Graham Merkel]

On Mon, Aug 12, 2002 at 01:35:20PM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> The fine communists over at marxists.org have approached me about the
> possibilities of sharing content.  They have a lot of content that's
> under the GNU FDL, and they've expressed an interest in putting it
> into the wikipedia.
> 
> I was brutally honest with them about my own personal opinion of
> Marxism, which is quite low, and they were more pleasant to me in
> return than I deserved.  I recommended that they subscribe to this
> list to chat about how best to put their stuff into the wikipedia.
> 
> I recommended that they might want to add just a few articles a day
> for as long as it would take, rather than dumping everything in at
> once.  This would give people a better chance to respond.
> 
> They appear to be interested in non-bias, and to understand that
> people would want to make modifications in order to make things
> satisfactory to a wide audience.  They appear to have a genuine
> interest in contributing solid knowledge.
> 
> I'm just saying this now to invite everyone to go take a look at
> their site, so that we can have intelligent comments for them.

They have some quite useful material there - for instance, as a random
sampling I had a look at some of the "F" articles - the article on
Milton Friedman was brief, but reasonably accurate AFAICT, the 
article on Betty Friedan was OK but would need some editing, and
the article on Sigmund Freud would be useful reference material but
wouldn't be useful as the basis of a Wikipedia article.

I agree that a drip-feed of articles, particularly until we get
used to their style of contribution, is the best way to go.

It will be an impressive demonstration of the power of our
method if we can successfully collaborate with these people.

-- 
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Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk at mira.net
Node FLY on Melbourne Wireless : http://www.wireless.org.au
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