Content-Type: text/html Wikipedia: Wikipedia commentary/The elements of an encyclopedia project

[Home]Wikipedia commentary/The elements of an encyclopedia project

HomePage | Wikipedia commentary | RecentChanges | Preferences
You can edit this page right now! It's a free, community project

Suppose we wanted to categorize encyclopedia projects, e.g., Nupedia, Wikipedia, Encarta, Britannica, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and so forth. For this, we could produce an exhaustive set of encyclopedia project characteristics. Differences among the projects' characteristics would distinguish the projects. For example, Nupedia is carefully-controlled; Wikipedia isn't. Nupedia and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy pay only a few people; Britannica, presumably, pays everyone involved. Nupedia is not proprietary; Encarta is. Etc.

The elements of an encyclopedia project can be characterized in terms of functions (e.g., article-writing), goals, and a few other items. One can then present a number of choices about how each function is performed. A number of such choices are listed below; this isn't an exhaustive list.

1. The writing function

2. The review function

3. The copyediting function

4. The acceptance function

5. The posting (technical) function

(Etc. We needn't concern ourselves with this now?)

6. General characteristics of official policies

7. Goals of the project

The items in #7 ought to determine our choices in #1-6 (if we're being rational).


Discussion

What does "coordinating all of the aspects of the the encyclopedia" mean? --LMS

A: A mostly systematic review of article content, format, topic hiearchy, link structure, etc. Most of these should be self-healing processes and could be placed within other categories such as copyediting. 'Self healing' because wiki is almost a genetic organism with new mutations created/altered/destroyed on an ongoing basis.

Wiki - the 'Self healing genetic algorithmic public encyclopedia'


I see. Well, indeed, "self-healing" ought to be entirely included in the other processes. The processes aren't necessarily discrete; they might work all at the same time, depending on the system. --LMS
HomePage | Wikipedia commentary | RecentChanges | Preferences
You can edit this page right now! It's a free, community project
Edit text of this page | View other revisions
Last edited March 30, 2001 12:01 pm (diff)
Search: