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GNUPedia Project Starting

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the new-use-of-gnu dept.

Hector Facundo Arena writes: "The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource (GNUPedia) Web page is online today. GNUPedia is a project for the development of a free encyclopedia. You can read more in the Richard Stallman's project announcement document. We invite you to participate in the project and join the mailing lists"

3 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Spelling 'mistakes' by istartedi · · Score: 5

    Perhaps someone could write an American English to Brittish English translator.

    Maybe they will add one to Babelfish, so that you can type in "I was smoking a cigarrette while pushing the pram" and get back "I was burning a fag at the prom"

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  2. It's all about editting by Ian+Bicking · · Score: 4
    I've been doing some work at an ecyclopedia publisher for several months now. All their employees are editors or people assisting the editors (and a few administrators, etc). All the research and writing, including the subject-specific editors, are freelance. Most come from academia

    In some ways this shows some promise for GNUPedia -- the real content is already coming from distributed individuals, usually people for whom writing is not a profession. OTOH, I think it shows the weakness as well -- what makes a bunch of articles an encyclopedia is the editorial influence. The web already has lots of articles, but it doesn't have the editorial influence.

    Most of what the editors do is bitch at the contributors who are late submitting their articles. This is because an encyclopedia that covers 90% of the necessary material is a bad encyclopedia. Who's going to do the bitching for GNUPedia? And how would they possibly have any authority to bitch? They aren't paying anyone anything...

    I think GNUPedia should place more emphasis on compiling and cataloging. Most of the content already exists. That's what OpenDirectory is all about... that's what the web is all about... and a lot of the content is from people who wouldn't mind giving up control, because they aren't receiving anything in return anyway. A little flattery could go a long way...

    If already-existing resources were compiled and editted, released under a copyleft-license, GNUPedia could really be successful. But as it seems stated, it feels like GNUPedia is just a rephrasing of what the web already is.

    Also, GNUPedia or some subset needs some exclusiveness. I think a lot of people who contribute to these encyclopedias do it because in a small way it makes them a published author. In academia the greatest rewards are things you can say about yourself, not things you have. If GNUPedia can make people rightfully proud of being contributors, then it can definately succede.

  3. Control by THB · · Score: 5

    Real encyclopedias are controlled by editorial boards that provide unbiased, fair and reasonable content. Judging from slashdot, and RMS' personal opinions I would conclude that is encyclodepia would be quite biased. In order to be of any use, it will have to be unbiased. If stallman is any judge of why people write free software, contributors will not want to write for it unless they can influence others opinions. We can see this right on the page with the comment about the "GNU system", sometimes called linux.

    Is this really the type of encyclopedia that you would want?