[Wikipedia-l] A quick thought about 1.0

[Daniel Mayer]

Delirium wrote:
>A belated comment: I'd still like to make sure there's *some* 
>standards for Wikipedia.  It would be unfortunate if it turned 
>into "1.0 is the 'real' encyclopedia, so 'wikipedia raw' is an 
>anything-goes dumping ground". 

Agreed. However I think our standards for the 'raw' version of Wikipedia 
should in fact be better than than the current standards are. This in fact 
should happen naturally once a stable version is set-up; most long-time 
contributors will want to make their articles good enough for inclusion in 
the stable version. That should enhance the quality of pretty much 
everything. 

I also strongly support the idea that there should not be any artificial size 
limits on the number of topics to include in the stable version (but it could 
be divided into encyclopedias covering different subject areas - such as an 
encyclopedia of mathematics or even of the Tolkien Universe). Of course a 
paper version would require size limits but our on-line version of stable 
should not. 

The paper version would simply be a subset of stable that is reformulated for 
the constraints of paper (article size will have to reduced for many topics, 
long tables will have to redone or cut out, and hyperlinks will have to be 
converted into something that will work on paper). 

To help with the article size issue in the paper version, all Wikipedia stable 
content should, IMO, be in a type of news style (where lead paragraphs would 
be what one would expect to find for an entry in a concise encyclopedia and 
the less relevant material is placed at the end of articles or relegated to 
daughter articles). That would make it easier to cut out the less relevant 
material. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_style and  
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:News_style

A CD version, for the foreseeable future, can and should be the entire stable 
version. We may need to either restrict the number of topics covered in the 
future or move to a multiple CD and/or DVD media. Or we could simply divide 
the stable version into different specialized encyclopedias (including a 
general one and a concise one). Category tagging would make this possible. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)