Re: [WikiEN-l] Columbia and Copyright

Martin Harper wrote: I don't know, but that wasn't my proposal. We absolutely must exercise our own editorial judgment, and not just for legal reasons, but because we're going to be a lot *better* than existing encyclopedias. To be perfectly clear, the point of this exercise is to guide us with solid information as to the feasibility of "slimming down" by selecting articles, rather than by editing articles. Clearly, we will have to do some of both. We have 10x as many words as they do, and 4x as many articles. It would not make sense, in my opinion, to try to retain our breadth of coverage by editing every article down to size. It would probably not make sense, either, to try to retain our depth of coverage by just omitting articles and not doing any editing down. But my hope here is that we might find that on the exact same topics as they cover, we have 12,000,000 words, and that actually our overrun comes from 10% of the articles that are huge compared to theirs. Or something like that. So we could learn that it's possible to select topics to get similar coverage to theirs, and then edit down only 5,500 articles, and end up with a book that's only a little bigger than theirs. Or, we might learn that the entire approach is hopeless, that all of our articles are so much bigger than theirs that we absolutely must do a ton of editing. But I do NOT propose that we simply run off an exact copy of their list of articles. I doubt if it would be any sort of legal violation, but more importantly, I think that their list is flawed and that we can improve on it. I'm just trying to get some estimates of what it is that we need to do, estimates based on actual numbers rather than conjectures. (Although, of course, at this early stage, conjectures are welcome!) --Jimbo