[Wikipedia-l] A quick thought about 1.0

[Jimmy Wales]

Cunc has argued, correctly I think, that the idea of 1.0 may be
causing people to delete things that really need not be deleted.  For
this reason, he thinks it best to pursue 1.0 under a non-Wikipedia
brand name, possibly Nupedia.

But I have this counter-thought -- while I do agree that the idea of
1.0 has been causing people to do some things that I don't really
think are best, I think the solution to this is to hurry up and
actually implement a plan/software/whatever to permit those who have
deletionist tendencies (no insult meant by the term!) to work on that.

The idea is that Wikipedia can be *more* expansive once we have a 1.0
"certification" process to keep people happy.  No one can argue "that
doesn't belong in an encyclopedia" after that, because the simple
response is "well, it may not belong in 1.0, but it's o.k. for
wikipedia raw".

It's really the confusion between
Wikipedia-the-always-in-process-website and
Wikipedia-the-final-product-encyclopedia that causes the tension,
isn't it?  Well, maybe not completely, but I think that a formalized
1.0 process would tend to prevent people from thinking of
wikipedia-the-website as the sort of place where we need to limit
ourselves to some finite number of topics.

--Jimbo