Re: [Bug-gne]Re: [reference] Re: Metadata

[Imran Ghory]

On 6 Jan 2002, at 21:18, Joakim Ziegler wrote:

> By the way, Wikipedia might be a decent place to put things like
> what's being discussed here. It already has nodes with large lists of
> things, like countries, deities, famous programmers, etc., etc. Also,
> of course, the threshold for contributing is zero-height.

I made the following post about why this project could/should exist 
independantly of wikipedia is a reply to a message in 
gnu.misc.disscuss

On Fri, 04 Jan 2002 00:05:14 +0000, in gnu.misc.discuss Imran 
<address@hidden> wrote:
>On 3 Jan 2002 23:17:52 GMT, address@hidden (Sam Holden)
>wrote:
>>Don't know the answer to the question, but why not add material to something
>>like nupedia (www.nupedia.com) or wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com).
>
>I'm familiar with both projects, in particular Wikipedia's Reference
>Tables (http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Reference_tables) is similar to
>what I'm intending. However Wiki isn't the most appropriate way to
>create such data, and the project I'm developing intends to
>specializes in only this sort of data.
>
>The advantages of specializing include,
>
>1) We won't include detailed non-tabular data, the wikipedia mixes
>the tables with non-tabular data a bit too much (although this isn't
>there intention)
>
>2) We can use a standard format, virtually every table in wikipedia
>follows it's own style, the advantages of a standard format are
>enormous especially when it comes to exporting to standard formats
>for databases and spreadsheet, allowing users to sort, search and
>generally use the data far more flexibly then other methods would
>allow.
>
>3) Independence of each table from the rest of the project more
>easily allows third parties to integrate the data into their own
>projects. Independence of each article goes against the very
>principle of wiki.
>
>4) Specializing in tables we can write searching algorithms which are
>more effective for our cause then the general search system Wikipedia
>and the like use.
>
>5) Independence and focusing on a specific area will allow us faster
>growth. [1]
>
>>Contributing to an existing project is often *far* more productive than
>>doing it all yourself, especially for something like factual data, which 
>>unlike
>>say X11 window managers (since there are *lots* of them) doesn't have much
>>room for variation anyway.
>
>Having separate project doesn't mean that we will be totally
>independent, after all the tables already produced by wikipedia[2]
>can be adapted to my proposed project, and no doubt tables which we
>produce could be easily integrated into Wikipedia, especially as we
>plan to stick to a standard data format.
>
>After all sharing is what open source and freedom is about :-)
>
>Imran
>
>[1] An example of the advantages of focusing is Planetmath (
>http://planetmath.org/ ) which is an open source maths encyclopedia
>which is growing faster then Nupedia.
>
>[2] This may not be entirely possible as some of Wikipedia's sources
>(http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Public_Domain_Resources) may be
>non-GFDL compatible.

Imran