[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia-l digest, Vol 1 #1249 - 14 msgs

[Ulrich Fuchs]

> I think what Ulrich is most worried about is he doesn't want a
> stable encyclopedia to be a fork. This can be easily avoid by puting
> a link to the current Wikipedia article on hte Nupedia version,
> labeled "Edit the latest version of this article".
>

Actually, that's not at all what I'm worried about.   ;-)

What I'm most worried about is that Wikipedia will lose contributors, because 
most of them won't get a choice to decide what's in the "real" encyclopedia 
and therefore lose interest. The closer (the more "officially") Nupedia is 
associated with Wikipedia, the less interesting it will be to spend time for 
Wikipedia, because everything one is doing there is just the "foreplay" for 
the "real thing" Nupedia. 

I admit that I have my personal problems with the Nupedia editing policy, and 
the way authors are treated there as more or less irrelevant (because the 
important persons aren't the authors, but the almighty editors). I once 
offered two ready 2 page articles on "Sauna" and "Sherry" for the Nupedia 
project. I got an awnser like this (I'm exaggerating here, to make my point 
clear): "It's nice, thank you, but can you please strip it down to one 
paragraph, then we will consider to put it in the editing process as soon as 
we've found an editor suitable to the subject". Guess what? I never thought 
of Nupedia any more, and I never heard of them, too. I doubt if Nupedia (if 
revived and taking [[Sauna]] and [[Sherry]] from the Wikipedia will ever be 
able to find someone (or even a group of people!) with a university degree in 
either Saunology or Sherryology that is willing to work for free and will 
"approve" those two articles.


But now back to the subject: Imagine what would happen if the title page of 
Wikipedia wouldn't say any longer: "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free 
encyclopaedia", but instead:

"Welcome to Wikipedia, here you can upload articles that probably will go into 
the free Nupedia encyclopaedia editing process some day if the people there 
like it and have the right approved editors for your subject".

Again - If Nupedia wants to use Wikipedia articles (forking them or not) - 
they're free to do it, the License perfectly allows for that. Just go ahead 
and do it - there will be enough Wikipedia editors merging back the approved 
articles to Wikipedia, both will profit from that. (However I'd like to see 
how that's going to work with that silly GNU FDL requesting to cite all the 
history. Merging a history from Nupedia and one from Wikipedia in the 
Wikipedia talk page (where else?) must be fun!)

But I strongly oppose the Wikipedia *supporting* that in any further way. It's 
like shooting ourselfs in the knee (is that a valid phrase in english?). 
Apart from that, there are some problems at Wikipedia that should be adressed 
by developers first (performance, searching, just two name a few.) I don't 
see a reason why one should spend development time to make Wikipedia suit for 
the Nupedia editing process.

Uli