All,
Well, our Jason Potkanski and Greg Sabino Mullane have finished deleting the
inactive Wikipedia articles, leaving around 3000 (!) pages. We could delete
the two-thirds of these which appear to consist simply of tagged articles,
which are otherwise unchanged from the Oct. 2006 Wikipedia version of the
article. But just to be on the safe side, we'll leave them up for now. We
can always delete them en masse later, and we can delete them by hand now.
We can use the "Articles to Delete" category to tag the ones to delete...
Anyway, I can report that we've started articles on these topics this
morning (from most recent first):
STS-1
Flow (Psychology)
Tel Aviv
Nuclear reactions
Elenchus
Taxation
Arik Einstein
Kaveret
And some others...last night, I created "software fork," which is now just a
pathetic stub, a definition. But it's *our* pathetic stub! We can fill it
out with info from WP if we like--or not!
There are many important article topics to create. In fact, now, *most*
important articles have not yet been created.
We have a lot to do, and perhaps more importantly, we have a lot of things
to *decide*. For instance (to pick an example ready to hand--not to
criticize anyone!), is "flow (Psychology)" the correct form of the article
name? Or, instead, "flow (psychology)"?
So I suspect that one of the most salutary aspects of this change will prove
to be other people getting their hands dirty with policy and help pages.
I've been encouraging others to join in on those policy and help pages, but
they rarely have (there are notable exceptions of course). I've
occasionally wondered why they've been working on articles but haven't cared
about policy.
The reason that I've long suspected is this: if there are already over a
million articles in the database, *those articles*, de facto, set the policy
for the project. To declare that some article policy is anything other than
what is on display by the WP-sourced articles is to declare that we must
"clean the Augean Stables" and change hundreds or thousands of articles by
hand. And who wants to get started with *that*?
Sanger's Principle of Content Forks: one cannot copy large amounts
of content without also copying the policy according to which the content
was made.
Given that principle, and since communities are defined by their policies,
it follows:
Sanger's Corollary about Communities Created by Content Forks: one
cannot start a significantly new kind of community by copying large amounts
of content created by another community.
--Larry
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