On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 10:04:56 -0500, Poor, Edmund W <Edmund.W.Poor(a)abc.com>
wrote:
The latest issue of Software Development magazine is
on-line now:
http://www.sdmagazine.com/documents/sdm0504e/
Yes, that's great.
And I found a professor of church history whose
students cite Wikipedia
in papers they write.
How does the professor feel about this?
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'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 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
Sexy. I'm pretty sure we will publish a print edition on our own well
before 2008. Would this change their interest in doin the same? Perhaps
they want to publish a niche variant that we would not be interested in...
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.")
Get who out of whose hair? I wish I saw more of you around the mailing
list, in fact... don't let the trolls stress you out too much.
--
+sj+
On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 10:01:20 -0700, Tom Haws <hawstom(a)sprintmail.com> wrote:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
I don't have all the answers, but the first
idea
that popped into my mind was:
* Let users (or a subset of them) "tag" an article
version.
* A tag (or "flag") could take on any assigned
meaning.
* My favorite tag idea: "Vandalism-patrolled by mav" (!)
* Here's another: "Selected for the print edition"
This is the right approach. All article versions need to have several
slider flags associated with them in the database. Some of those flags,
like confidence, need to be automatically set according to the
software's judgement of the trustworthiness of the editor (based on some
reputation model). Other flags need to have an interface radio button
setting so readers/editors can rate the article versions on any number
of aspects.
Or if a Wikipedian makes a minor correction (like
spelling, punctuation, grammar; or an obviously
relevant internal link) to an article version tagged
by the foundation - then it would be GREAT if the
software would notify the foundation's editors. They
could quickly review the change and probably be GLAD
to endorse the current version. This would PREVENT
forking, or at least reduce it to a bare minimum.
Better yet, if a Wikipedian makes a SIGNIFICANT
IMPROVEMENT to a foundation-tagged article version,
I'd think the foundation would be OVERJOYED to
endorse it. (I'm planning to educate them about
using the History and Diff functions.)
Right, Ed. There is absolutely no reason for a fork. All we need is
some proactive, creative, and *bold* programming experimentation.
Long live
Respectipedia.org!!
Tom Haws
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--
+sj+
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