On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 10:21 AM, Aryeh Gregor <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 8:13 PM, Platonides <[email protected]> wrote: >> You have a copy of wikipedia on your hard disk. You can access it. >> But your computer lifetime is finite. And you also don't know for how >> much time you'll still have electric current. >> What do you do? > > Screw Wikipedia. If I want to preserve useful knowledge, I'll make > sure to safeguard my textbooks. In terms of utility for rebuilding > society, the value of Wikipedia is zero compared to even a tiny > university library. And there are many thousands of university > libraries already conveniently scattered around the world, not a few > of them in subbasements where they'll be resistant to nasty things > happening on the surface.
Certainly not zero. Perhaps 10%? Neither textbooks nor wikipedia are normally designed to give a total soup-to-nuts explanation of how to do something. But you're right that textbook-style knowledge is still relatively cloistered, ununified / siloed by author, and poorly covered by wikipedia/wikibooks. If there are 10,000 essential textbooks, thats only ~10x as much information as is in Wikipedia already. How do we effectively include that in Wikimedia's work? I think that the "cheatsheet / overview / bootstrapping" version of information about a topic is quite valuable and useful, and that few people create such materials today [we don't have a good noun for that kind of work, for instance]. SJ _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
