Ed Poor wrote
I think we're finally beginning to be taken
seriously. We have half a
million articles, and we're approaching the level of
respectability
which Encyclopedia Britannica labored for centuries to achieve.
The question is, where do we go from here?
Good question. Obviously a million articles on wiki-en in a couple of years
time is within reach. That now would 'merely' consolidate WP in English;
the versions in other languages are coming on fast (especially the German).
Getting it all interwikied might look like busy-work, but would surely be an
outstanding cross-language project, historically speaking.
Larry Sanger left the project
for a mix of
reasons, but SOME of them made sense (at least to me). We
never resolved the tension between:
A) Anyone can edit any article, any time; and,
B) People can count on every article to be accurate and fair.
Well, I think the project opted for A. We can never have quite enough folks
to give warranties for B. The next best thing is to have thousands of
Wikipedians editing, and A has turned out to be (unexpectedly) good at
making WP a popular place.
I was approached by the director of a foundation (with
a multi-million
dollar budget) to create a fork of Wikipedia leading to a print
edition
to be published no later than 2008. If I do this, maybe it will get me
out of your hair? (The Cunctator wrote, "Rinse, wash, repeat.") But I
worry whether a fork is the best approach, or even necessary at all.
I wrote a few days ago that some sort of tipping point would be reached. I
personally feel that this is also part of the WP model - what one could
expect of a successful attempt to make commoditised knowledge open-source.
I for one will lose little sleep over this. I think the WP communities are
probably less schismatic, over content, than one might fear. But time alone
will tell.
Charles