Jimmy-
What I'd like to do is sit and explore Britannica
and Wikipedia,
comparing and contrasting our strengths and weaknesses, with an eye
towards my REAL project for the week, which is to put together a
"Roadmap to 1.0" for Wikipedia.
In my opinion, Wikipedia should be the unstable version of Nupedia, a bit
like Debian has a permanent unstable section. Things in Wikipedia can be
complete nonsense, but they are always up to date. We may add a team
certification model to Wikipedia eventually, but I'd be happy to see a
simple Sifter solution as envisioned by Magnus (without the limit to
certified experts as reviewers which I think is what Larry wanted). IMHO
it would make perfect sense to use the Nupedia name and domain for that
project.
Nevertheless, a "State of Wikipedia" document would be useful. We should
create this for the English Wikipedia specifically, and describe reviewing
methodologies. I've done such reviews myself, first with Microsoft Encarta
and recently with Britannica. In both cases, Wikipedia often had much more
and more accurate material. It suffers especially in the foreign politics
department for countries that few people know about. Much of our
information there is still the CIA text. Our history section has
substantial gaps or contains old Britannica content, but we have many,
many history buffs who are very active correcting this.
A good approach to see where we have weaknesses is to take a look at the
"Oldest articles" list (from the Special pages menu). These are the ones
that people apparently don't look at, or cannot contribute anything to. It
would be useful to compare the quality of those to the quality of articles
in another encyclopedia.
Eventually we may want to create a [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Patchwork]]
specifically to address our weaknesses. This would not be a "let's get
ready for 1.0" thing, but a permanent improval process. The 1.0 release
for CD-ROMs etc. would be prepared by the Nupedia editors.
Regards,
Erik