Daniel Mayer wrote:
Why not make it
equivalent to a language Wikipedia?
We already have the 'Simple English' Wikipedia. The
other language type link on an article could tell you
the page had been selected (or moved).
No offense, but this is a horrendously bad idea. We should instead focus
on
adding a good category system and on writing articles
in news style so
that the
first section of each article is a concise article in
its own right (I
call
this the 'lead section').
I also think that Simple was a bad idea as well since the lead section can
and
should be written in language that can be understood
by an average
person - no
special knowledge of the subject area should be
required to understand the
lead
section.
In addition, it would be nice to have the ability to mark particular
versions
of articles as "ready for print" (via a
sifter-like mechanism). Then when
the
Concise Wikipedia script parses the database it would
create concise
articles
out of the lead sections of every article version that
was marked 'ready
for
print'. That would prevent any vandalism from
entering the print edition.
Thus we have no forks and no freezing of Wikipedia articles. We could also
create an updated version of Wikipedia Concise with each database backup.
Such
a thing would be great to have in a format that could
be used by PDAs and
palm
top PCs. Hm. MediaWiki Lite...
Personally, I'd like a 'Print version' (well, actually, that name isn't
great, as we already have 'Printable version' it'd easily get confused with,
but I don't have a better suggestion for example purposes) link on each
article page. This goes to a Print: namespace. For example, article Foo, the
print version link goes to 'Print:Foo'. I haven't decided whether a
'Talk:Print:Foo' would be good, or to just use the normal Talk page
(probably the latter). The pages in the Print: namespace are absent (red
link) until someone edits, when someone makes the first edit, they get the
text of the current article revision in the edit box (possibly with some
automated change, like piped links become a (see [[blah]]) after the linked
text). Deletion of Print: pages would leave the associated normal article
and talk pages intact.
'Wikipedia:' or 'Special:List of Print version articles' would be a good
thing to have, or something along those lines.
Even if we don't use this plan, we definitely want to keep them separate
from normal articles. The print versions should be different, and we
shouldn't freeze or delete normal articles for this. I'm not keen on a
en-print.wikipedia.org type fork as was suggested, but it's at least an
option.
Personally, eventually, I forsee three versions: the Pocket Wikipedia
(basically the first-paragraph thing), the Concise Wikipedia (a big volume),
and the Unabridged Wikipedia (pretty much the entirety of the web content).
Concise will want pictures, but shouldn't overdo it.
Anyway, my thoughts on the matter.
-- Jake