Geoff Burling wrote:
On Wed, 3 Mar 2004, Ray Saintonge wrote:
dpbsmith(a)verizon.net wrote:
[snip]
Thought
number 2: regardless of the legal defensibility of the use
of some other encyclopedia's list of articles as a guideline for
shaping Wikipedia's, it strikes me as being intellectually lazy
and a bit dishonest. If we claim to be producing an encyclopedia,
and do not have any other way of knowing what should be in it other
than to compare its contents with some other encyclopedia, we're
certainly leeching off of someone else's work, regardless of
whether or not they can conduct a successful lawsuit over the matter.
But we do have other ways, which will point to other exclusions. Why
not use them all, including Columbia? This does not imply that we will
have the same contents.
Did I miss something -- or more likely, misspeak myself? I thought this
exercise was simply to find out where Wikipedia's coverage was unacceptably
thin & ask our contributors to focus on those holes.
Not at all, but I can't say that of some of the others. I read it
exactly as you say, and thought it was a good idea. Some of our
brilliant colleagues took it as an introduction to the topic of
copyright violation.
And my comment in an earlier email about Columbia's
boast of an article for
every proper noun from the Bible seems to have taken on a life of its own.
We should have been making our boasts two years ago, rather than letting
Easton take the blame..
I'd only be worried if the _Print_ Wikipedia had
that; & frankly speaking,
if the editor of the Print version was faced with choosing whether to
include the name of a personage who appears once or twice in the Old
Testament & is known only to the most serious Rabbinical students & their
Christian equivalents at the seminary, or to ensure that there is an
article for every president of Venzuela, I would vote for the latter.
Some of these personages are so far down in the begats that one wonders
if they might have been misbegotten. If we claimed that one of them had
been President of Venezuela, who would notice?
Further, even if after this research we learned where
Wikipedia was
unaccepably thin, we can decide not to address any of these weaknesses.
if I may fall back on my credentials (I have a BA in English), I wouldn't
lose sleep if Print Wikipedia failed to have an article on John Skelton,
a 15th century English poet. Thumbing through my copy of _The Norton
Anthology of English Poetry_, I can easily find a dozen names that I
would trade to ensure that Wikipedia could boast, say, a complete listing
of all of the common songbirds in Australia.
Red Skelton would mean more to some readers than John Skelton.
What will happen with the Print Wikipedia (unless Jimbo
has negotiated
some special deal) is that the publisher will take a snapshot of Wikipedia,
extract some 30,000-50,000 articles, subject them to copy-editting &
legal review (e.g., finding every mention of "Kyle is a fag" & removing
it), then publish it. Completing even a few hundred stubs would burn up
the savings any publisher hoped to realize from reprinting an existing
source.
I hope they're not waiting for us to do it.
I've complained elsewhere that all we do on
Wikien-l is talk endlessly
about things. I feel that a small group needs to be selected to address
this project, & do the required work to bring it off. Or at least let's
create another mailling list to discuss this, so that Wikien-l can go
back to talking incomclusively about things like who needs to be banned,
& the endless edit wars about the proper names for Eastern European rivers
& cities, & Middle Eastern topics.
These are great subjects for some people to show how brilliant their
ignorance really is.
I completely sympathize with this point. If a print edition is going to
be a reality, which I hope it will, people will need to make decisions
about it. Excuse me if I appear cynical about that prospect.
Ec