[Bug-gnupedia]Peer Review, Article Formats, (not)Censoring,

[Simon Cross]

Greetings!

The posts so far have covered a fair amount of ground.  I'll start by
saying that I'm 100% for GNUPedia becoming a "distinctive body of work in
itself", as suggest in option 1) of Duncan Lock's post "Human GNUPedia
interface".

Peer review seems the way to go.  In order to make this practical it
should be possible for authors to arrange peer review for their articles.  
This will take a lot of the load off of the people (i.e. people on this
list) who are actively developing the stuff behind the content. GNUPedia
might then organise its own "peer review network" which can provide
reviewing of content.

After reading some of the posts, I think a rating-less peer review system
as used by scientific journals is best.  A reviewer reads an article and
either asks for corrections or gives the article his/her stamp of
approval.

Now for some technicalities:

1) I feel that plain HTML is the format we want. GNUPedia can issue a
template (example) article which authors then edit.  Many scientific
journals issue similiar TeX templates for submissions to their journals.
The complaint that HTML might be difficult to write in is mute.  If you
want to submit an article, read up on how to do so.  That said, we should
have some tutorials on article writing.  I think frames and layers should
not be allowed (they will cause trouble with navigation around the
encyclopedia).  MathML should be included if possible, although I have no
idea what support for MathML is like.  Animated gifs would be fine (unless
they gif license would cause a problem).  I'm uncertain as to what else to
include.

2) Here's my list of meta-information which I feel should go into an
article:
        author's name, email address, homepage
        date of last update, date of first writing
        reviewer's name, email address, homepage, digital signature
        date of review
        copyleft information
Multiple authors and reviewers should be allowed.  I don't think we need
much more than this.  Keyword searching is not the way to go.  Google
kicks butt.  I rest my case.

3) Linking to non-article content is going to be tricky.  The two cases
I've thought of so far are linking to non-HTML content (images, applets,
audio clips, movie clips) and linking to other webpages which are not part
of the encyclopedia.  I think Richard Stallman's announcement suggested
that GNUPedia not link to other webpages unless they either fall outside
the scope of the encyclopedia (e.g. CNN.com website) or are part of the
encyclopedia.  I would suggest that links to other GNUPedia articles be
mark as such (with a little [*] or something next to the text being
linked) while links to outside websites be left plain or separated out
into a special reference section.  The problem with images, applets, etc.
is that is difficult to make them an official part of the encyclopedia
since we have little control over the format.  Reviewers might not be able
to sign images or applets within an article, for instance.  Thus an author
might alter an image without changing breaking the signing of an
article.  At the very least the copyleft notice in the article should
guarantee that all images, etc are included in the copyright.  Linking in
general needs a lot of thought.  How do we stop links breaking?  Should
links to articles on different servers be marked differently?

Lastly, I feel that censorship will be an issue with the
encyclopedia.  Art, and most pornography falls into this category for some
reasion, is not within the scope of an encyclopedia unless the artwork is
particularly famous.  For instance Boticelli's (sp?) "Venus" would almost
definitely make a showing, and the cover of Playboy's first issue might
too.  The bunny-of-the-month from hamster.sex however is recent news and
should be in the encyclopedia.  Historical issue's (Nazis,
Apartheid) will be covered in their proper place.  So will medical issues.

Ciao
Simon Cross

--- Imagine there's no heaven.  It's easy if you try.  
    No hell below us.  Above us only sky.
                           John Lennon, Imagine.  ---

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