[Wikipedia-l] Stable versions policy

Thu Dec 22 16:08:23 UTC 2005

Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> On 12/22/05, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
>   
>> I'm surprised that Wikipedia mirrors such as Answers.com don't
>> work more like Wikireaders, where a human editor picks useful
>> article-versions and leaves the stubs unmirrored.  The added value
>> from such an "editor's choice" would be a perfectly valid business
>> model.
>>
>>     
>
> You'd have to spend a whole lot of money to get human editors to pick
> the "useful articles".  It might pay off in the really long term, but
> it'd require a huge investment.  And due to the GFDL some other
> company could just come along and take the results of that huge
> investment and drive you out of business anyway.  I'm not at all
> surprised no one is doing it.
>
> It's enough of a value add to present a page with results from
> multiple different sources, organized without all the editing tools
> and other extraneous things useful only for editing.  It's enough of a
> filter to just leave out article versions which were reverted within 5
> minutes (or some other determined time period).  Until recently the
> mirrors tended to perform faster as well.
>
> When I want to read Wikipedia, I go to the mirrors, not to
> wikipedia.org.  Wikipedia just doesn't do a very good job of
> distributing its product, and it wastes millions of dollars of
> donation money trying.
>
>   
It is "long" life the Wikimedia Foundation did never spend millions of 
dollars. Consequently it cannot have wasted this amount of money. Given 
the amount of investment in its operations it is also boasts the best 
cost benefit ratio in the business. Then again you have to define 
benefit because the WMF does not make a profit. You also have to define 
cost because we should value the effort that went into our "product".
> This is not to knock the Wikipedia, which does a great job of
> producing articles.  I don't think you'll ever be able to cater to
> readers and editors on the same site though (although to some extent
> that comes down to a semantics question of what would be considered
> "the same site").
>
> Anthony
As your basic assumption is wrong, I would also say that your conclusion 
is wrong. Yes, Wikipedia is an outstanding project it creates both 
content and it serves content for an unbeatable price.

Thanks,
    GerardM