On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 8:42 PM, Thomas Larsen thomashlarsen.wmf@gmail.com wrote:
Hi folks,
I am formally proposing that Wikipedia be forked and that a new compendium of human knowledge, Wikipendium, be created as an independent alternative with a more pleasant, respectful, productive, constructive community with simple, clear rules and an unbureaucratic and responsible governance structure.
I believe, along with many others, that Wikipedia community members are frequently unjustifiably hostile towards viewpoints other than their own and towards the users who hold these viewpoints. In addition, I feel that Wikipedia has become too bureaucratic, ineffective, and indecisive and has placed the values of quantity and openness, while important, over those of quality and reliability respectively. I believe that Wikipedia's continued rejection of, and discrimination _against_, experts is outrageous and must be amended, but in a far less elitist and arrogant way than Citizendium has attempted.
The official proposal may be found as a blog at http://wikipendium.blogspot.com/ . All people who are interested are invited to participate in discussion there.
Hi Thomas,
Thanks for your interesting idea. I'm curious what your end goal for the content is. Part of the power of Wikipedia is that at the end of the day we can point to a grand mission for the whole project -- to create freely accessible encyclopedias in all languages, about just about everything. ("We're here to write an encyclopedia, and everything else is just details" has been a core part of the culture for as long as I am aware). The Foundation mission ("The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free content license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally") is vague, but it does pretty much encompass what the projects do.
Your proposal is very eloquent, but it seems to be primarily focussed on how the community of the new project would function. Is, however, the end goal for that community roughly the same as Wikipedia's/Wikimedia's, or are you interested in something different? I got "a useful, reliable, and free compendium of human knowledge" from the proposal, which sounds just about like Wikimedia's mission. Is that accurate, or do you have something else in mind?
-- phoebe