[WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0 Paper Plus

Tue Aug 19 12:33:03 UTC 2003

limholt at excite.com wrote:
> One of the goals generally included in the Wiki 1.0 discussion is
>the creation of a paper Wikipedia. This sems to have an assumption
>that lot's of material gets dropped or summarized.

Well, I don't *think* so.  Right now, we're in the ballpark of the
size of Britannica, possibly a bit bigger.  But then, we have a fair
amount of questionable fluff lurking around.  So if we're thinking of
1.0 being approximately equivalent in size and quality to Britannica,
we shouldn't have to cut anything good from where we are today.

In the future, this will likely be a problem.  If Wikipedia 2.0
follows 1.0 by a 3 year time span, for example, it's likely that it
would be twice as big and totally problematic as a print version.

But for 1.0, I don't envision a lot of cutting.

I can totally imagine in the future that we'll have multiple sifted
editions, for example:

Wikipedia 2.0p - full version, paper
Wikipedia 2.0d - desktop paper, a highly shortened version
Wikipedia 2.0e - electronic, no size constraints at all
Wikipedai 2.0r - raw, sifted articles plus everything else, too

But rather than get into a game of excessive a priori design, I think
we should stick to "1.0 is just 1.0" as a mantra.  And what I mean by
that is that we keep a 1.0 release simple, a single release, and the
approval process focussed on openness and reliability of articles,
rather than infinite flexibility for potential
printers/publishers/distributors.

I do also like the idea of Wikipedia: History of Rock Music and
similar.  But "1.0 is just 1.0".  :-)

--Jimbo