Francois,
please don't give up so easily. If you truly believe that this is
something worth doing and encouraging, it should take more than a few
people saying "maybe" rather than "yes" to make you give up. Nobody
here has said "no" to your proposals; if you think you can make this
work, then have courage and try to make it work, even when it seems
difficult. I will try to address and discuss some of your current
concerns below.
On Sun, 3 Oct 2004 16:22:46 +0200, oboenfan <oboenfan(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
As I did discover yesterday this background mailing
list (I did all the time
suppose that all the talk where open talks in the open-talk pages; I know,
it was naive) I was chocked.
Yes, there has long been debate about whether we should use
mailing-lists such as this. The main reason they still exist is that
people find them more convenient for certain kinds of discussion than
the wiki pages. They are not intended to be any less open.
The "no":
---------
The open character of information ressources may be a potency but it is a
danger at the same time because there is no indicator of quality. If you by
something at ebay, you know that the partner is registered, you can look for
his evaluations and you can even look what other user did criticize. You
can open the other young article and look the texts concerning the
problematical transaction. All that has no equivalent in Wiki.
Working out how we can ensure quality is one of the biggest issues
facing Wikipedia today, but we know it, and we are constantly working
to introduce mechanisms to help. You mentioning e-bay here is
interesting, because they have had to try hard to solve a similar
problem - how to measure trustworthiness of anonymous sellers over the
Internet. Clearly, you feel that their current measures work well
enough to trust - others might point out that it is still possible to
fool people by making multiple small, genuine, sales to gain a
reputation and then making a larger, fraudulent, sale.
There will probably *always* be a struggle to improve such systems,
but that should not stop us trying to create projects which have the
chance for real beneifts.
You consulte
an information, perhaps an important information with consequences on your
comportement because that and for the next development of your life, and
there is no evaluation or possibility of any control. It would be possible
to enter problematical information with the objective to influence. What to
influence is a question of the specific detail.
I'm not sure what you were trying to say with the example you gave
here. If you meant that it is possible for Wikipedia to contain
incorrect information, then again I say: this is something we are
trying to address; the official policy is that Wikipedia should have a
"Neutral Point of View" - any article which deliberately sets out to
influence is one that needs fixing, and we are trying to find ways of
spotting and labelling such articles.
But your example almost suggests to me that the CIA's World Fact Book
may be the one in error - or, at least, that there may be credible
challenges to its figures. A *good* Wikipedia article would actually
*help* here: with no agenda of its own, and no editorial control to
suppress alternative viewpoints, any supportable statistics could be
entered alongside each other, with a discussion of why each may be
better or worse. This is an advantage of the wiki approach, not a
disadvantage.
[...] And if
this information would be correct why did you give in wiki the ok to start
new wikis in those declining dialects and languages? Only to disturb the
unity of countries like France or Spain etc? Or did you do that with the
conviction to help people to develope somewhat, that is precious to protect,
somewhat with a great valor? Today your restrictive conviction concerning
solresol is for me an indicator more of the first as of the second:
Soleresol was a great invention. But different people don't want to allow
that other languages as national language can exist parallel to the national
language.
I disagree with your conclusions here: the various language wikipedias
were started by individuals or small groups of people who thought it
would be a useful, achievable project resulting in a useful resource.
I have seen nobody say that you should not be allowed to propose this
project; only people who are not sure whether it is achievable, or
whether it would be useful. So prove them wrong: convince them that it
could be achievable, and would be useful, and set about making it
happen.
A lot of idealists works in these pages, do her best
to make a lot of
Different editors of course reinvente only the wheel (and
it seems you prefer those editors: A encyclopedie book oder CDROM costs only
10 Euro in Germany today)
I'm not sure why you consider us as "reinventing the wheel"; no, we
are not the first to write an encyclopedia, but we are the first to
write a collabourative, multi-lingual, freely available (not only for
no money, but also with no restrictions on copying and distributing),
un-biased encyclopedia. How is that encouraging people to reinvent the
wheel?
For this reason I did in the supposition that Wiki did
be a really open and
wide seeing institution say to me: YES, I cooperate also.
Some decisions have to be considered carefully: if we allow too many
versions of Wikipedia that turn out to be unsuccessful, we risk taking
effort away from others that have better chances of success. On the
other hand, if we create too few, we are failing in our aim of making
information available to those who need it. So it is only natural that
we want to pause and consider before saying "YES" to your proposal.
But I did ignore those back ground tribunals like this
access limited
email-list wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
I still don't understand why you think of this list as
"access-limited": you were able to post here, as is anybody else who
wishes to. If you mean it is not well-enough publicised, that is a
different matter: the discussions on this list are no more closed to
the public than on our wikis.
and the opinion, that a persone can
only get a chance if he already did have this chance on a different place,
if he already has a successfull community (* Audience : who will read this
new language, how many people does that represent, if few people, are they
likely to be better served by another language * Editors : who will work on
that new project, how many people ).
You have to be aware that creating an encyclopedia in a new language
is a big challenge, and not something that will just happen as soon as
you decide to start. This is what Anthere meant about needing an
audience and editors - it doesn't matter if they don't exist yet, but
it matters if they never will. If you start a project where you are
the only contributor, it will be extremely hard work, and you will not
have the power of collaboration which makes Wikipedia work. If you
start on a project where only you want to read it, all your effort
will be wasted, and better spent elsewhere.
So to make a project successful, you need to have reason to believe
that your project will "gather steam": that there will soon be enough
editors to make a real start, and that there are people out there who
will find your work, use it, and with luck become contributors
themselves. You don't need to already have a community, but you need
to have the means to build a community. For a solresol encyclopedia,
you need enough people who know solresol, or who are willing to learn
it, that will be interested in reading it, and hopefully also in
helping create it.
In short: if you think there are people who will want to use this, and
want to help you with it, those are your editors and readers, even if
they don't know it yet. If you believe that they are out there, then
you have my blessing to start, and probably that of most others here.
Have courage.
--
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]