[WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0 Paper Plus

Wed Aug 20 19:54:42 UTC 2003

Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:

>What's wrong with extracts of Wikipedia? I have a book
>called "Micropedia of World History" (that looks like
>it's part of a series) which is 300 pages of
>historical events in timeline form. As I look through
>it, I see that wikipedia could do better than this if
>we put some work into it consolidating our timeline
>and historical articles and condensing them.
>
On my shelf I have "The Timetables of History" which does the same thing 
(but only to 1990) in 631 pages.  What would be unique and distinctive 
about a Wikimedia publication of this sort?

>Specialized encyclopedias don't have to be that
>specialized. For example, I think we would have done
>excelently on that encyclopedia of American Biography,
>but it would be better if we extended it to all
>biographies. We could call it the encyclopedia of
>people or something. All of our stubs on people would
>still help, because it's better than nothing if it is
>used as a reference book. Haven't you seen a
>2-sentence entry in a real encyclopedia? I have, at
>least in World Book (I'm not sure if it counts as a
>real encyclopedia, though).
>
The same thing for biographies.  If we are just reproducing what is 
already easily and widely available, our publication will not have the 
intellectual value that we want it to have.  The citizen of a third 
world country is likely to be far more interested in the biogrphies of 
his fellow citizens than of Americans.  Selling him biographies of 
Americans is more likely to reinforce his existing attitudes about 
Americans.  We've got a long way to go before we can produce a credible 
biographical directory that would be acceptable in the third world.  The 
problem is not so simplistic as permitting 2-sentence entries.

Ec