[Wikipedia-l] Do we really need a Sifter project?

[Daniel Mayer]

Ulrich Fuchs wrote:
>With an "official" cannibalization of Wikipedia arcticles for 
>Nupedia articles there would be no content - people do not 
>like it to write without being acknowledged. 

What are you talking about? By law the Nupedia article would have to give full 
credit to Wikipedia and have a link back. Our content is already being used 
in many, many other places as well - this is not cannibalism. That is the 
whole point of the GNU FDL - re-usability of the text.

>They get this acknowledment right now by supporting the 
>free encyclopedia idea *directly*.

And the people who commit free software patches to CVS are not *directly* 
supporting free software? I don't get your logic.

>I bet most of the contributors will have a very bad 
>feeling about not doing the "final" thing any more, 
>but being just the idiots who do all the work for some 
>guys and girls at Nupedia who will be the "gods" which 
>- at the end of the day - decide rather authorically what 
>is good content and what is nonsens.

I'm not advocating that Wikipedia should not also have its own process for 
making what it calls a stable version - I'm just saying that the result of 
any such a process can be further certified by an additional process. If a 
particular result of that process isn't liked by Wikipedians then it doesn't 
have to be used in Wikipedia (simply revert the page). 

The reason why the Nupedia brand makes sense is because any "stable" version 
of an article would necessarily be static - nothing wiki about static. There 
is furthermore nothing "wiki" about a printed version. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)