[WikiEN-l] Oour quality could rival Encyclopedia Britannica (was:Guardian article about Wikipedia)

Mon Oct 24 16:10:21 UTC 2005

Ed Poor wrote

>What conclusion can we draw from this? I'd like to hear some discussion
on this, please.

Interesting that Ed and I, not a usual combination, have both been talking 
recently about the [[Arnold J. Toynbee]] article on its Talk page.

Interesting, that is,  in the sense that Toynbee was hot on civilizations' 
responses to challenges, as catalytic of development.

WP actually needs rivals, right now.  My view is that WP can easily take on 
_any_ online opposition, as far as factual volume is concerned.  We have the 
bodies.  We can simply put up enough 6/10-rated articles (today's Guardian) 
about _everything_, and dominate Google.  Simply extrapolate from where we 
are.

I like that approach.  I like, for example, posting good bibliographies of 
prolific authors, where the WWW generally has scrappy lists.  In the long 
run, and with good search and hyperlinking, we create a most awesome 
research tool.

There are these other challenges:

- quality writing (doesn't come easy)
- higher accuracy
- fuller reach into deep academia, outside the Anglophone world (for 
wiki-en), across cultures
- get the other breaking-new media to say 'uncle'
- put hard-copy encyclopedias out of business
- make people want to release under GFDL so that WP can easily assimilate 
their content
- Textbooks'R'Us, have our articles segmented so that getting a reasonable 
first textbook draft is just a filtering exercise.

But I think we know all this.  To return to Toynbee, it is more a question 
of how to get Wikipedians to 'feel challenged', on the specifics.  Right 
now, with the site running slow, the main practical challenge seems to be 
hardward/developers/cash.  _I_ mostly feel challenged by the sheer breadth 
of approach needed.

Charles