[Wikipedia-l] Partnership with Mandrakesoft

[Yann Forget]

Hi,

Le Thursday 23 September 2004 19:54, Brion Vibber a écrit :
> On Sep 23, 2004, at 1:42 AM, Yann Forget wrote:
> > Le Thursday 23 September 2004 03:26, Brion Vibber a écrit :
> >> Certainly we could give them a stripped dump in that timeframe, but I
> >> think they'd be wasting a lot of money pressing it to disc in that
> >> state. I can't support this as described.
> >
> > Is Wikipedia that bad? ;o)
> > No I don't think so. There are obviously many stubs, incomplete
> > articles and
> > so on, but still I think that it is a valuable pice of work.
> > Or so I was told. ;o)
>
> Wikipedia is a very valuable resource, but it's a *dynamic* one. If
> you're going to throw away the advantages of our process, you'd better
> have something else to fall back on.
>
> There's a *lot* of crud in general. There will be mistakes. There will
> be falsehoods. There will be 'FUCKFUCKFUCK' vandalism. And in six
> months when they go to press, the Wikipedia on the web will be much
> improved -- but every mistake in their published copy will be preserved
> indelibly and it's us, not Mandrake, who's going to get the bad press
> over it.

Really I don't think so.
We will need proper notice about what is Wikipedia, how it is built, and we 
will have a link on each article with a mention "see the updated version 
online". So users will be able to update articles whenever they like it.

You will say, "What the use to have a DVD if I can see the article online."
Well if you have a 56K connection, there is a big difference between updating 
a few articles about current events (Irak, US elections, etc.) and getting a 
whole encylopedia with a total of 4 GB. Anyway, the biography of Einstein 
won't be very different in 6 months time, so it doesn't matter to upgrade it, 
but the article about the next US elections will.

People buying the Mandrake Linux distribution will get Wikipedia as a bonus.
So even if you don't have an Internet connection, it's better to have a free 
but not perfect 6-month-old encyclopedia than nothing. Seing than commercial 
encyclopedias are usually several years late and are far to be cheap, it will 
be quite good.

> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Yann

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