[WikiEN-l] Re: Primary sources

Mon Jan 5 21:08:47 UTC 2004

Ed Poor wrote:

>Is Wikipedia destined to be little more than an annotated collection of
>web links and bibliographical references? If so, I'm going to continue
>to lose interest in the project.

Oh, Ed, don't tempt me.... ;)

More seriously, I think Wikipedia is at a point where increasing the 
_number_ of articles is less important than improving their 
_quality_. I'm not sure what the best strategy is for doing this. One 
possibility might be to seek funding for the purpose of hiring some 
information specialists (such as librarians and/or or experts in 
various fields) to help with cataloging, organizing and editing. The 
model I'm thinking of here is OhMyNews, an online newspaper in South 
Korea. About 20% of its content is written by its staff, while the 
majority of articles are written by more than 10,000 other 
contributors who are paid small amounts of money for their work.

Has anyone considered the possibility of some kind of creative 
partnership with commercial encyclopedia companies? If IBM is getting 
into Linux these days, it's not inconceivable that World Book or 
Encyclopedia Britannica might develop an interest in getting involved 
with Wikipedia before things advance to the point where their own 
rationale for existence disappears.
-- 
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|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
|     Weapons of Mass Deception
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