Book People Archive

Re: The rise of the Wiki encylopedias (was: World's Oldest Newspaper...)

On 4/5/07, Larry Sanger <larry.sanger@[redacted]> wrote:
> As to the claim that "it is not clear" that CZ is going to use a free
> content license: we will use either the GFDL, CC-by-sa, or CC-by-sa-nc.  The
> first two are obviously free licenses, but some deny that the third deserves
> the name "free content license."  I think this is just purism-driven
> semantics.

What a word means _is_ semantics, and it's not something to be
dismissed trivially. The people who are generally credited with
starting the free content movement as a movement--Richard Stallman,
etc.--tend to have a rough agreement about what free means in this
context, and forbidding commercial use is not part of it. I realize it
sounds better to say free than nearly free, but the end of that road
is a word meaning nothing. If you think the CC-by-sa-nc is a free
license, you saying that you're going to use a free content license
means nothing to me, since I have no idea what definition you might be
using.

>
> Every indication is that the Citizendium model--not an *opposite* model, but
> *another* model--is working quite well indeed.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and yours doesn't look
quite ready. When I clicked on the links on the home page "Games" and
"Hobbies" and "Mathematics", in the first two cases I was faced with a
stub article and the last was filled with red links to subjects that
have entire undergraduate courses at colleges.

I am curious to see what type of effect limiting Citzendium to "family
friendly" and probably more encyclopedic topics will be. One of the
reasons I use Wikipedia is because I can put a random name or subject
in there and get a page without wondering whether it is considered
"encyclopedic".