On Feb 29, 2004, at 10:30 AM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Pointers to "good enough" versions is going
to be helpful, and then of
course once we have a "manuscript", the publisher will probably want
to copyedit it one last time, and may need to make some slight
modifications in order to fit some technical print requirements.
(Note: this email is rated PG for minor suggestion of forking. Parental
discretion is advised.)
I appreciate this idea, and until I heard a good deal of this thread I
agreed,
but I think there is a flaw. While a pointer system lets the online
article
grow with it's print cousin, most of the time any good online version
is going
to need more than a little copyedit and "slight modifications". Others
on this
list have mentioned that links explain information in the 'Pedia, and
we need to
add info at those reference points to compensate for that. This is one
example;
there have been others. In these cases, it seems more appropriate to
work on a
separate version.
Now we have the thesis and antithesis. The synthesis is to use
pointers to cull
articles, then go through those picked and "fork" (there, I said it).
This fork
will have good versions of good articles to make the minor edits to.
The idea
is that at this point there are no edits which need to be made which
ought to be
in the online 'Pedia too. The fork would be for edits necessary for a
print
version.
Peter
-- ---<>--- --
A house without walls cannot fall.
Help build the world's largest encyclopedia at
Wikipedia.org
-- ---<>--- --