The WMF mission is to provide free knowledge to the world. Wikipedia, in particular, hopes to summarize all notable topics into a neutral sum.
Accomplishing this goal means Wikipedia an the WMF will have to evolve. Consider the implications of the mission: Every single work that contains notable topics must have complete coverage in Wikipedia. While every article need not cite every work, every article must accurately summarize every notable opinion of every notable topic in every work. Some have interpreted the role of the proposed citations project as one of merely centralizing the citations that already exist in Wikipedia. The mission, however, calls for a broader vision. This new project should have a bibliography of all works since that is the scope of the mission. The nature of knowledge further calls for us to understand the links between items containing knowledge, their categorical context and their abstract relationships. This broad, unambiguous view of works and their topics will allow us to explicate them neutrally and select only the most notable ones for inclusion. It will, in the limit of time, prevent our judgment from being clouded by the limited, local view of knowledge that we currently have. The proposed new project has the following features: It is a bibliography of all kinds of works that fall under the umbrella of the WMF mission. Works and collections of works contain disambiguating user contributed text and media. Works can link to other works. Works come together to form categories. People can use this site as their personal bibliography, encouraging participation of a much greater community of users and curation of the bibliography them. There are many challenges to creating a project of such scale, but in order to accomplish our goals of freeing knowledge we must strive to collect it and understand it in a more nuanced way than we currently are. Brian Mingus Graduate student Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab University of Colorado at Boulder _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
