[Foundation-l] Article validation (was WikiReader Free Software and Free Contents)

Mon Jun 7 07:00:07 UTC 2004

--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Nod. But we could give different goals to products.
> For example, the goal of wikireaders could be from now
> on be much more defined.
> 
> It is already a different goal that wikipedia
> * it offers limited information (it is an extract of
> wikipedia)
> * it tries to cover quite generally a whole topic (eg,
> a wikireader on a country will covers its geography,
> politics, economics, tourism etc...)
> * it is meant to be read only (errors can't be fixed).
> 
> * it is meant to be sold (while wikipedia is free)
> 
> We could add to these different goals the fact the
> information in it has been double checked, that it
> undergone an *organised* peer-review (rather than a
> quite anarchic one like on wikipedia). 

I agree with all of this and would like to add that the WikiReader idea could
eventually be expanded to cover entire limited subject/focus encyclopedias
(such as concise, science, biography, war, geography, ... etc.). Good
categorization could be used to help select which articles to go into these
various WikiReader encyclopedias and the concise version could use the lead
sections from a much larger set of articles. All selected articles would then
have to go through some kind of approval process and fixed as needed or
discarded from the list (all edits would still be on Wikipedia). 

The idea that we could go from where we are to being able to print an entire
general encyclopedia like Britannica's megapedia (but larger) makes my head
spin. I think that the WikiReader idea could organically grow to fill that
role, but in manageable steps. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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