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Today's Topics:
1. Absorbing other wiki projects into the Citizendium (Larry Sanger)
2. Re: Absorbing other wiki projects into the Citizendium
(Alexander Gieg)
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Subject:
[Citizendium-l] Absorbing other wiki projects into the Citizendium
From:
"Larry Sanger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date:
Mon, 2 Apr 2007 16:47:10 -0400
To:
"'Main Citizendium'" <[email protected]>,
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To:
"'Main Citizendium'" <[email protected]>,
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
All,
I've been overwhelmed with the excellent opportunities thrown our way. One
type of opportunity is this: some people have suggested that they will
transfer the contents of their professional wiki projects to the
Citizendium. There are two wikis for which this is a possibility, and one
other content project. Also possible are two published encyclopedias from
the 1980s and 90s, now out of print I believe, which certain stakeholders
are interested in letting us use. I'm sorry I can't give you the details,
but suffice it to say that it's pretty exciting stuff.
We can "bootstrap" ourselves very well with new content and, no doubt, the
new people that will come with it.
So this then leads to a question for you: do you know of floundering
academic wiki projects, or projects that people have lost interest in, that
have much content that might be appropriate for CZ? If so, can you please
invite the principals of those projects to contact me at
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Let us use the content; we'll make sure it doesn't
go to waste.
--Larry
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Subject:
Re: [Citizendium-l] Absorbing other wiki projects into the Citizendium
From:
"Alexander Gieg" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date:
Tue, 3 Apr 2007 07:28:12 -0300
To:
"Larry Sanger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To:
"Larry Sanger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
CC:
Main Citizendium <[email protected]>,
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dear Mr. Sanger,
(...) do you know of floundering academic wiki projects,
or projects that people have lost interest in, that
have much content that might be appropriate for CZ?
What about including the contents of old, public domain encyclopedias,
such as the 1911 (?) Britannica, or the Catholic Encyclopedia?
Lots of articles in these are surely outdated, but others are still
very usable, and even the outdated ones might still serve as a basis
upon which their contents could be simply updated, rather than wrote
from scratch. All with an added benefit: any improvement made to them
would be copyrighted under Citizendium's own preferred license, rather
than some accommodation such as keeping Wikipedia-sourced articles
GFDLed.
And after a public domain encyclopedia was added, projects could be
developed upon it: one to properly apply Citizendium's writing
standards and categories to them; another to merge whatever is good in
them to already existing Citizendium articles on the same subject;
another to mark articles as either "outdated" or, if they're still
good enough, "approved"; another to actually do the updating; and so
on and so forth.
And why not also keep the original articles from these untouched in a
special, non-editable area of the site? It might serve as a historical
repository, and live articles could link to these for all those
interested in knowing how a subject was understood in the past.
I believe Citizendium's value would increase exponentially by doing this.
Sincerely,
Alexander Gieg
My two cents:
It's more like /all /of the articles from such old reference works are
outdated. It's not just the information they contain. It's how the
information is organized. Our understanding of many concepts covered in
such works is profoundly different today. It's this understanding that
authors and editors to organize information into an effective
encyclopedia article. I'm afraid using such outdated works for anything
but historical content would do more harm than good. For example, using
virtually any kind of biology or medical article from the 1911
Encyclopaedia. Britannica. would be foolish because they were written
without a clue about the genetics - which has become the key organizing
principle for understanding virtually every field of biology and
medicine. Likewise, many if not most articles related to astronomy,
cosmology, and physics are probably beyond rewriting, since the authors
barely had a clue about the size of the universe or the material and
forces which form it. While I think that compiling online copies of
public domain reference works is a worthy historical project, I don't
think it's now a justifiable project for CZ considering the enormous
amount of work that needs to be done to establish CZ as a new, top-notch
encyclopedia. Best, Andrew A. Skolnick
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