[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia hits the big time

Wed Mar 16 15:04:56 UTC 2005

The latest issue of Software Development magazine is on-line now:

http://www.sdmagazine.com/documents/sdm0504e/

Their excellent article "The Wiki Way" gives significant attention to
MediaWiki software and the Wikipedia. There's even a section on Wiki
Woes (like vandals).

And I found a professor of church history whose students cite Wikipedia
in papers they write.

I think we're finally beginning to be taken seriously. We have half a
million articles, and we're approaching the level of respectability
which Encyclopedia Britannica labored for centuries to achieve.

The question is, where do we go from here? Larry Sanger left the project
for a mix of reasons, but SOME of them made sense (at least to me). We
never resolved the tension between:

A) Anyone can edit any article, any time; and,
B) People can count on every article to be accurate and fair.

Not enough people were interested in Larry's "Sifter Project". I don't
know if anyone is using Magnus Manke's "tagging" software. Do we need to
fork?

I was approached by the director of a foundation (with a multi-million
dollar budget) to create a fork of Wikipedia leading to a print edition
to be published no later than 2008. If I do this, maybe it will get me
out of your hair? (The Cunctator wrote, "Rinse, wash, repeat.") But I
worry whether a fork is the best approach, or even necessary at all.

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed