[Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Partnership with Mandrakesoft

Thu Sep 23 17:24:13 UTC 2004

On 23 Sep 2004, at 03:26, Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Sep 22, 2004, at 6:40 PM, Bryan Derksen wrote:
>> My impression was that this isn't going to be a "reviewed" 1.0-style 
>> Wikipedia, but rather a plain old snapshot that's had all the images 
>> lacking the correct licencing tags automatically stripped out, and 
>> possibly the articles with {{stub}} in them stripped out as well 
>> (personally I think stubs should be left in, but IMO it's probably 
>> not a major issue either way). The downside of this approach is that 
>> it's bound to catch a few articles in a "bad" state, but the upside 
>> is that it will actually be possible to do it in the timeframe 
>> needed.
>
> Certainly we could give them a stripped dump in that timeframe, but I 
> think they'd be wasting a lot of money pressing it to disc in that 
> state. I can't support this as described.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

<aol>
I second Erik, Mark (Delirium) and Brion's concerns. The biggest issue 
is copyrights and another issue is to sort out the fluff from the 
stuff. (Admittedly there is alotta fluff in there at any given time, so 
no matter how quickly any fluff would get improved, the fluff would be 
in a ''snapshot'' and that needs sorting out.) I reckon an even 
remotely legally tenable and generally "decent enough" solution will 
probably take until AT LEAST winter 2005/2006, and probably a year 
longer. Unless Mandrake were ready to put in all that work (and they'd 
only have to pay a couple of thousand professional reviewers given the 
timeframe they're proposing), a suitable "review mechanism 2.0" would 
be about ''essential'' in order to "get there". Such a mechanism would 
still have to be (a) agreed upon, then (b) developed, then (c) deployed 
and it's only then that (d) the "getting-it-right" process proper can 
even START. This will take time. Especially because "(a)" should not be 
rushed.

I'm not under the impression that Mandrake are fully aware of what 
their proposal would entail.
</aol>

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com