wiki-l Mailing List: Re: tie-in with Wikipedia

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

On Fri, 16 Feb 2007, Andrew Netherton wrote:

> As you are all no doubt aware, Wikipedia has a page on cohousing:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohousing
>
> Once wiki.cohousing.org is up and running, it's only logical that said
> page change to reflect our wiki's existence.  Whether that's an
> instant redirect to our wiki, just a link to it, or something in the
> middle, that may be a matter of a vote on Wikipedia's editors' part.
> Once we're up and running, however, I don't see why we can't simply
> crib that page as a starting point, giving them something to look at.

Some of us have surely edited that article a bit I would think. Michael
McIntyre posted recently encouraging folks to set a "watch" on it to help
monitor changes for vandalism. I'd have to check but suspect I have added
an external link or something.  In fact we could add an external link
there to wiki.cohousing.org with the comment that it is under construction
relatively soon.

But it would be inappropriate to try to replace that article. That article
serves a different purpose.  It is an encyclopedia style that is an
overview with a moderate amout of depth to the concept of cohousing which
is searchable along with similar depth articles about everything else in
the world.

wiki.cohousing.org is more like a looseleaf notebook of theoretically
unbounded thickness for the accumulated but edited information about all
aspects of cohousing.  It will cover things which are minutia relative to
wikipedia's depth.  Wikipedia's great benefit is that it is edited to
contain the encyclopedia level of info without being cluttered with
too much detail.  That is why it is ofen more efficient to search
wikipedia for an introduction to a concept rather than googling it
and being inundated with documents of marginal relevance to finding and
overview.

Fred

-- 
Fred H. Olson  Minneapolis,MN 55411  USA        (near north Mpls)
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