Re: Slightly Off Topic: GPL'ed Encyclopedia ?

["Justin Ross" <opiskin hotmail com>]

>your own from scratch.  However, you can't just make up factual
>information.  The research effort would be enormous, as would the 
entrophy
>level.  You'd end up with stuff like supercomplex descriptions of 
quantum
>particle physics while the "18th-century British Literature" article
>forgets to mention Pope's _The Rape of the Lock_.

Yeah, it would be an entirely different animal.  But I don't think 
that's necessarily bad.  It would be a long term struggle to achieve the 
kind of breadth of an encyclopedia, but I expect that early on it might 
achieve a kind of depth better than existing encyclopedia's (deeper, at 
least, than MS's offering).  Essentially, then, it's a herd-the-cats 
problem.

Second, the distinction between software and information becomes more 
and more problematic.  The stability of the book as a form of technology 
has made us regard it as more or less transparent.  In contrast the new 
technologies of the text, which have software clinging to them 
everywhere, seem to be gathering more attention than the content they 
carry.  I think what I'm getting at here is that we are making the tools 
free, but soon we'll turn to content, because that's what the tools are 
for.  And you can transmit a manuscript just as fast as you can transmit 
source code: it submits to the same kind of economic conditions that are 
beginning to supplant the proprietary software model.

I'm offended that academia has gotten so involved in the practice of 
exclusive publishing.  It ends up hampering discourse instead of 
generating it.  When I teach, I don't want it to be like this.  And so I 
get a sort of twinkle in my eye when I think that, maybe, text and 
discourse can begin to change the way that free software has.  I hope 
it's an unstoppable force.

Justin

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