Re: [Bug-gnupedia] Who will fufill RMS' announcement?

[Bryce Harrington]

On Thu, 25 Jan 2001, Aaron Swartz wrote:

> It seems that we're all missing a key portion of RMS' announcement:
> 
> http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/announcement.html
> 
>     The free encyclopedia will not be published in any one place. It will
>     consist of all web pages that cover suitable topics, and have been made
>     suitably available. These pages will be developed in a decentralized
>     manner by thousands of contributors, each independently writing articles
>     and posting them on various web servers. No one organization will be in
>     charge, because such centralization would be incompatible with
>     decentralized progress.
> 
> Neither Nupedia, nor GNE (or whatever we're calling it now) fit this bill
> since they specify a specific server and format/database for the document.
> It seems what is called for is a list of links to files (anywhere on the
> Web) that qualify as encyclopedia articles. Forcing people to submit their
> articles to a central server as both Nupedia and GNE seem to be planning
> would clearly go against this description.
> 
> Does either GNU, GNE, or Nupedia intend to tackle this assignment?

Yep.

Nupedia's wikipedia will be capable of tackling this, because there
already exists something in the Wiki community called InterWiki, which
allows different wiki sites to cross-link in a decentralized manner.

For example, the original wiki at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki is geared
mostly to computational design patterns.  Another wiki, focused on, say,
Java language development, might wish to interlink to the design pattern
site, rather than hyperlink to or copy from the original site.  This
allows pages to be developed in independent, topic-focused, possibly
even stand-alone collections, and users can link to whatever set (or
meta-set) of wiki servers they wish.  Now, there's no organization in
charge of enforcing and dictating how those wiki's actually work - e.g.,
whether they contain editorially verified data, or whether their layout
or software is "standard", or whether the stuff in them might be
controversial or even incorrect.  However, it's working, and making
great progress on a pretty broad front.

I don't think anyone has interwiki-linked to wikipedia yet, but as it
gathers more (good) articles, I think it's inevitable that this will
happen. 

Bryce