[WikiEN-l] Concise Print Wikipedia is a Fork

[Daniel Mayer]

>One example of the difference is in internal references 
>(or q.v. entries). Even if the 'news style' first section 
>approach is used, the first section of the full Wikipedia 
>article would contain links to articles that don't exist in 
>the concise version.     

Oh come on. That is easy to fix - don't mark what would be dead links in a
concise version as anything special. This could be done automatically. 

>Another difference was raised by Mav himself, when he 
>asked that 'we have no forks and no freezing of Wikipedia 
>articles.' I give firm support to the idea that we should 
>never freeze a Wikipedia article in the process of creating 
>the Concise Print version. But the urgency of creating the 
>print ready version imposes two areas of discipline. The first 
>is (IMHO) that we will need to freeze an article as ready. 

Sifter software has already been written that exports the current article
version of selected articles to another site. It is therefore a fallacy to
think that freezing the article is the only option. Just edit the Wikipedia
article into news style and then select the resulting version as ready for
print. Let a script take care of the rest (removing everything but the lead
section, converting links to something that would work in print, removing what
would be empty links, etc.).

>The  second was raised by Ray Saintonge (Ec), and that 
>is that the project will probably need to restrict editing 
>rights, something that we'd never want in Wikipedia.         

Only give selected people the ability to use the sifter software. Fixed without
the need for a fork or freezing Wikipedia content.

>When I wrote the first note about using the 'Language Wiki' 
>method of creating a fork, I just assumed that the fork was 
>going to happen. 

So long as I'm still breathing I will strenuously fight against any
Wikimedia-sponsored fork. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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