Re: Slightly Off Topic: GPL'ed Encyclopedia ?




/ Soren Harward <soren@cinternet.net> wrote:

> Phew, that's a helluva idea.  Unfortunately, the GNU/OSS/FSF movement
> if not a "free information" movement, it's a "free software" movement.
> There's a huge difference: if you don't like your mail client or there
> isn't a program that does something you want, you can just write one of
> 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_.

> Can you imagine the FUD?

It's a herculean task, to be sure. However, so is, oh, for instance building an
operating system.

The good news is that, to an even larger degree than an operating system, the
task of building an encyclopaedia is highly parallelizable and modular. People
writing different articles don't even need to know about each other or what the
others are doing, other than for the purpose of cross-references. There is also
the added (very large) bonus of having some material to work from. For
instance, The Project Gutenberg website tells us that work at least is underway
for something called "The Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia", although it has no
files available for download, and hasn't been updated since 1995. However,
Project Gutenberg also has things like the CIA World Factbooks, which include
lots of encyclopedia-worthy material, in addition to piles of other reference
material.

Now, there are a few incompatibilities, such as Michael Hart's insistence on
everything being "Plain Vanilla ASCII Texts", and the fact that PG never
actually does any development work, only transcription of work that has gone
into the public domain.

However, if one were to make a deal with PG, for instance that all material
from a Free Encyclopedia project would pass into the public domain and be
turned over to Project Gutenberg in ASCII form, in return for the encyclopedia
project being allowed to borrow freely from the PG archives and turn this into
a richer text format for the use of the Free Encyclopedia (which really should
include stuff like a thesaurus, dictionary, etc., and be pluggable into other
applications, so you could get NeXTStep-like dictionary lookups, a thesaurus
function for word processors, etc.), I'm sure the people at PG would agree.

Also, there is another part of such a project that is well within the scope of
this mailing list, and that is the creation of a free reference material
framework. I'm sure quite a bit of that task would overlap with GNOME help
viewer efforts, and an encyclopedia project should probably use some sort of
SGML or XML format for the data.

I'd be very interested in participating in a free encyclopedia project. It's
the kind of interdisciplinary project that I find most interesting and
challenging. I'd be happy to devote some resources to it as well, such as
getting space for a mailing list and web site to organize the project. If
anyone has any thoughts, I'd love to hear about it.

-- 
   Joakim Ziegler - styx art director - joakim@styx.net
FIX sysop - FIXmud admin - FIDEL developer - Freehive admin



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