On 7/3/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher(a)student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
G'day mboverload,
[I'm not even going to bother fixing the top-posting on this one, so
'bye-'bye context. Please, Dan Tobias posted a link explaining this.]
Just to expand: They don't need to mirror
the Wikipedia: content. All
they
have to do is link back to the actual site. TaDa
- problem fixed.
Once again, I think you've missed the point. We want Wikipedia to be as
accessible as possible. This means:
a) We *want* to be mirrored
We're producing a free-content encyclopaedia. For that purpose,
everything we write is licensed under the GFDL. All our work is
*explicitly* available to anyone who wants to take it, provided they
abide by the rules set out in the GFDL. In addition, much of the
revenue that pays for servers and so on comes from mirrors like
answers.com who kick back some of their income (even though they
don't have to) as a "thank you" to us for providing free-as-in-speech
content. What, you thought our donations were enough to pay for
*everything*? Our mirrors owe us. And we owe *them*. We can't just
dismiss them.
b) We cannot assume our readers are using Wikipedia itself
We're producing a free-content encyclopaedia. That means we
encourage people to re-use our work. We don't want to limit that by
deliberately making life difficult for re-users.
c) We cannot assume our readers are connected to the Internet
We're producing a free-content encyclopaedia. The result, Wikipedia,
is *not* a website: it's an encyclopaedia that happens to be written
in hypertext and hosted on the Web. The content would not stop being
our content if it were not used in the context of our website. We're
taking advantage of the semantic and formatting opportunities
available through HTML and CSS, but we don't need to be a website for
that. Wikipedia content needs to be able to stand alone as well as
any other encyclopaedia's content could.
d) We cannot assume our readers are *capable* of connecting to the
Internet
Yes, even today, there are people living outside America, and unable
to access the technological marvels y'all are privileged with. It's
even possible their circumstances differ wildly from what you expect.
A version of Wikipedia on CD/DVD, for example, could make it a lot
easier for certain users to access our content ...
e) We cannot even assume our readers are using a computer
Wikipedia articles are printed all the time. We're probably too big
for our articles to be used in a traditional paper encyclopaedia, but
there's no reason certain articles couldn't be placed in a book --- a
hardcover "Best of Wikipedia" showcasing our featured articles, for
example, would be rather nifty. HTML is quite useful, but we should
not write our content such that it can only be enjoyed on a computer.
Thank you for taking the time to write that up, I now understand your
position better, and I have another solution =D
If it's so important, just make it a regular article. It doesn't have a lot
of that Wikipedia: feel and with some minor rewording it could be put into
article space. I know it would be an ugly duckling, but it would work.
mboverload