[WikiEN-l] No forks! (was: Re: Print edition)

Sat Feb 28 14:04:08 UTC 2004

Jake Nelson wrote:
>Even if we don't use this plan, we definitely want to 
>keep them separate from normal articles. The print 
>versions should be different, and we shouldn't freeze 
>or delete normal articles for this. I'm not keen on a 
>en-print.wikipedia.org type fork as was suggested, 
>but it's at least an option.

Why the hell does the print version have to be so different as to warrent a
fork in the content? All forks do is divide the workforce and multiply work to
update and extent articles - edits would have to be duplicated. 

How is that a good thing? I'm sorry but I won't shut up on this point:

NO FORKS! 

Call me a curmudgeon on this point if you like. 

Ray Saintonge wrote:
>And who is going to have the time to verify that all the 
>chosen articles are written in "news style"? 

And who is going to have time to create tens of thousands of forked articles?
Who is going to have time to keep the print fork and the live fork in content
sync? Some human is going to have to reformat existing Wikipedia content to do
that under the ill-advised fork idea. Best to encourage the natural development
of articles toward news style so that the lead sections can be concise
articles. Then all a human has to do is mark a specific version as ready for
print - no additional work is required so long as that version is already in
news style. This in fact is already the case for many, if not most, of our most
well-developed articles. 

We should encourage that. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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