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(a)mira.net
Node FLY on Melbourne Wireless :
http://www.wireless.org.au
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