[WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia hits the big time

Wed Mar 16 22:09:07 UTC 2005

> From: Sj
> > And I found a professor of church history whose students cite 
> > Wikipedia in papers they write.
> 
> How does the professor feel about this?

I dunno. I ran into him after lunch, while visiting the seminary where
he teaches. I wanted to talk to someone about getting the grad students
there, to polish their English skills by contributing to Wikipedia.
(Prof. Fuzheado led some of his students in this, and I suppose having
their articles edited mercilessly was of some benefit to them.)

But he suggested I talk to the academic dean, Dr. Andrew Wilson, who is
in charge of their ESL program. Andy was less interested in my ESL idea
than in a newly revived project of a colleague of his: Dr. Frank
Kaufmann, Director of Interreligious Affairs at the Interreligious and
International Federation for World Peace (IIFWP). I met with Frank on
Monday night about possible incorporation of Wikipedia content in the
IIFWP's proposed Encyclopedia.

I confess that I was so excited by this latter possibility that I forgot
all about the history professor!

> Do we need 
> > to fork?
> 
> I'm not sure how forking would help, but we do need to
> * get simple tagging/rating software to work (neither 
> templates nor categories are scalable substitutes at present)
> * have more explicit metadata [license info, article type, 
> article content flags; user licensing info, user flags]
> * encourage the regular production of static, 
> highly-organized subsets of
> our dynamic, somewhat chaotic whole.   (CDs/DVDs and their preparation
> steps; a variety of organizations of the encyclopedia, in 
> online and print
> versions)

I like tagging. Ever since I was a kid ("you're it!"). No, seriously!
Maybe mav and I can get Magnus Manke's software in gear for this.

I've been asked to propose a budget.

> Sexy.  I'm pretty sure we will publish a print edition on our 
> own well before 2008.  Would this change their interest in 
> doing the same?  Perhaps they want to publish a niche variant 
> that we would not be interested in...

Well, it would be heavy on World Peace, I guess (not much interest here
along those lines, everyone would rather talk about who can ban whom, or
fight about the correct name of Danzig/Gdansk. [By the way, Frank seemed
to know more about the dispute over the name of that city than I ever
picked up by reading Wikipedia.])

The IIFWP isn't looking to make money on a print edition or a DVD.
Perhaps they could fulfill Jimbo's dream of distributing a high-quality
encyclopedia to schools in poor African countries. (They are an NGO of
the UN, by the way.)

Uncle Ed