Wikipedia talk:Pushing to 1.0

User:Jimbo Wales/Pushing To 1.0/archive
Archive #2 of Pushing to 1.0 discussion (up to end of 2004)

WP1.0 editorial team discussions – Core topics discussions – Wiki sort discussions – FAs first discussions – Work via WikiProjects discussions

I've created this page to catalog some of my ideas for our push towards 1.0. But rather than it being an essay or bullet points written just by me, I'd like for people to treat it as a place where we can come to some community consensus about what to do. - Jimbo Wales

Frozen online versions[edit]

Is it possible to get a frozen online version of Wikipedia in parallel with the open (editable) version? The frozen version will only contain selected articles of good quality, which have been subject to peer review. The frozen version will be released as of a particular date and will no longer remain open for edit by anyone. Outdated frozen versions will be archived and newer versions will replace them. The purpose of having such a version is allowing researchers to quote Wikipedia as a reference. Otherwise Wikipedia has no credibility as a source of reference since anyone can edit it anytime.-Arman Aziz 08:22, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

It's in the works, and last I heard, being coded. That said, there are already frozen versions in a way, as you can click "permanent link" to the left of any page and retrieve a permanent, immutable URL that points to a particular revision of a page. Titoxd^(?!?) 08:25, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out. I tried the "permanent link" feature for a couple of articles and found that I can edit even the permanent link article. If that is the case, then how is it different from the current Wikipedia? Further, the permanent link doesn't have any specific version name. What I'm proposing is - can we have link to a frozen version (Say Wikipedia 0.5) available online in such a way that when I say I'm quoting this from Article ABC of Wikipedia 0.5 - anyone can go to that page of that version and find the quoted line, and cannot change it.

If there is more discussion on this topic (permanent link / online frozen version) on some other page of wikipedia can someone please point out the page name. -Arman Aziz 10:42, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Yes, you can edit it, but that edit affects the current revision. That URL will always point to the revision it originally did. Even if you edit on top of the revision, the link to the revision never changes. As to page, the only thing that comes somewhat close is this page from Wikimania 2006. Titoxd^(?!?) 05:05, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

I conducted a small experiment and found out that what you said is not entirely true. The "Permanent Link" button always direct to the "Latest" edit - which is same as the live wikipedia. You can check yourself - go for the Permanent link for Tagore - you'll see the revision I made just a few minutes back! - Arman Aziz 09:31, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Anyways, even if this is a bug and it is fixed - this permanent link feature is not giving me the benefit I was looking for. I am looking for a "permanently frozen" version which the wikipedia community certifies to be of "reasonably acceptable standard" - so that I can safely quote it and be confident that anyone can go back to that version and "verify" the correctness / authenticity of my quote. - Arman Aziz 09:31, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Opposition[edit]

I am opposed to a CD/DVD version or any other version other than online. Wikipedia1.0 ought to an online encyclopaedia, a subset of Wikipedia, with articles which are certified as complete and accurate and then protected from vandalism. I am not interested in working on any other kind of WP1.0. Adam 15:02, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Fine, but I think there's plenty of people who are interested in CD/DVD/paper versions of Wikipedia. Look at it this way; regardless of whether 1.0 is a set of "locked" Wikipedia articles or a publication on fixed media, the process of selecting and improving articles to a "complete" standard is a common goal, right? — Matt 13:35, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Why is someone opposed to a version on removable media? I can't see the problem, I plain simply can't see it. I'm lost here. Samboy 14:41, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'm sure there are people interested in a CD/DVD version but I'm not sure there's a market. I would expect that more computers are connected to the net than have have DVD drives, for one. Plus it seems odd to be putting effort into a 'hardcopy' encyclopedia when all the others are dead/dying, precisely because of the online versions. Dan100 12:02, Dec 25, 2004 (UTC)
- There definitely is a market. The German Wikipedia CD was published in September 2004 and has already sold out all 40,000 produced CD (and was downloaded for free about 100,000-200,000 times). The second edition, which is a CD bundled with a DVD, is being prepared. There would be even more demand for the English edition - not everyone has broadband Internet access at all times. - Marcika 05:19, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  - Out of interest what tech was used to make that CD? anyone can download the dumps and ram them on a CD/DVD but setting up a full mw install is kinda overkill for personal use. Plugwash 18:14, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

Extension?[edit]

I don't understand "extension" as used on the project page. Maurreen 17:00, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

By extension it is meant that the publishing standards (i.e. electronic (CD/DVD) and print) must take a usable (0.5) or featured (1.0) article as their basic building block. However, for publishing reasons things like format may need to change; and there may be changes needed for legal reasons. I think Mandrake want us to remove all fair use images for their forthcoming DVD release of Wikipedia. I'll amend the project page to make it clearer. :ChrisG 12:32, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Basic topics[edit]

Today I created User:Maurreen/Basic topics to list a small selection of core topics. Maurreen 00:58, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Is this even possible?[edit]

Before I start, let me just point out that I think the basic idea is great - the more people that use us/know about us, the merrier.

HOWEVER, I just don't see this as being possible. For starters, if one of the goals are to spread knowledge to places where Internet access is uncommon/very poor, how will we spread the word? We can't count on people to walk into a book/software store, see it, and be curious. And advertising on TV/in papers in every country is unlikely too.

Secondly, who's to say what is used and what isn't? Sure, stubs and the like would undoubtedly be excluded, but unless we have enough "editors" to form a (at least somewhat) representative group of Wikipedia users, how do we avoid excluding articles that really SHOULD have been included? And continuing along that line, how do we avoid forgetting an article that gives a (highly needed) definition of a term used in another article?

Thirdly, a book/CD version of the English Wikipedia would appeal mostly to those who speak a rather well English, of which most will have a way of accessing the Internet. Although this could be remedied by making similar editions of the international Wikipedias, I don't think many of those are ready for that.

On a final note, if we make a printed edition (on paper, that is), we will need some way of converting the hyperlinks so readers can tell that there is an article on that particular topic elsewhere in the book. Otherwise, much of the usefulness of Wikipedia is gone. --Pidgeot 15:44, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The short answer is that we won't know whether it's possible unless we try. Maurreen

On the hyperlink issue, I do believe there has been work done in this area- there are already several wiki to PDF convertors, and people are working on different ways of dealing with that issue. Lyellin 19:51, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

There already are at least two German-language WikiReaders. -- Jmabel | Talk 20:47, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

Sorry to burst everyone's bubble, but I think that creating a version 1.0 on a storage medium of any kind is not possible at all. This encyclopedia gets bigger every second. It's like the joke on Futurama when they all went to Mars University. Their library had all the information in the universe and all you saw were Disk 1 and Disk 2. You can compare it to the task of putting the internet on a disk. Even if you forgot that no way would a storage medium ever come close to the capacity necessary, it still isn't possible because the the internet changes less than every millisecond.

Now if you want to put only important articles on a disk, then you have another issue. How will people determine what's important? Wikipedia could set up a voting system and people who visit pages can vote for them. And then you could pick like the top 1000 or so voted sites and put them in the on a disk or on paper. (The vote would have to be by some given date since the sites will change in position in the polls every day.) That would work, but would it be what people want? You'd get random stuff put in the encyclopedia that most other people would think is not important and should not be in encyclopedia. (It will be like clicking "Random page" 1000 times. Check out Ingoolemo's 45 articles in the m:List of articles all languages should have under the "New goal idea" section. Now, you see what I mean by "random.") In addition, things that are current and ephemeral will probably be voted higher the things that have always been important, but just aren't interesting. What's important to me may not be important to you and vice-versa. And what's important to me today may not be important to me next week.

If people want to make an encyclopedia called "1000 Random and Possibly Interesting Things from Wikipedia as of May 28 2005", then I believe that could be made. -Hyad 08:14, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

I think there would be a general trend from more-important to less-important topics, which would be acceptable, although there might be a problem with systemic bias. meta:En validation topics has some discussion on rating pages by their "Encyclopedic general interest". Kappa 08:44, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

Watchlists[edit]

OK, so this may seem to be a non-related point, but how many articals are there that arnt on anyones whatchlists ?

I ask this because, corect me if im wrong, people only put articals on there whach lists that they are intrested in, and are therefor up to some kind of standerd that they set, othewise they wouldent be intersted on having it in there whatchlist. just a quick thought, might this be a way of seeing if n articals likly to be good or not? tooto 02:12, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

even if it dosnt help with this, then it would still be intresting to know ;-)

We currently have no way to know the number of people watchlisting an article.

And as one example contradicting your hypothesis, I sometimes watchlist articles that are so desparately in need of help that I need to spend some time with them at a later point, and "stash" them on my watchlist so I remember to go back later. Bantman 01:11, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)

I also tend to watch any article that I notice getting regularly vandalized or POV'd. Mr. Billion 18:31, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Long-term archival[edit]

Maybe this is kind of silly, but are there any plans to make archives of the wikipedia that will be able to survive for a long time? I'm talking nuclear wars, solar flares, collapses of empires, dark ages, etc. CDs, hard drives, and the like, even if there are thousands of copies distributed all over the world, don't really cut it. Imagine if we had the equivalent from 5000 years ago. (Then again, maybe we do. I'm no archaeologist. I imagine most of the records from that far back were destroyed or degraded to dust, though.) Just a thought. - Omegatron 02:17, Jan 27, 2005 (UTC)

I think it is kind of silly - we have no idea what sorts of weapons will be made in the future. It will also run against the laws of thermodynamics unless we can come up with a really clever way of harnessing useful energy. But also see Category:Time capsules. Brian j d 13:51, 2005 Jan 29 (UTC)

the single most succesful method of preserving information over millennia is to inscribe it in stone. so get a chisel and start chipping away beginning with the featured articles. dab (ᛏ) 08:07, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Clay is good too, but I hear you need to burn a building down on top of it. silsor 08:25, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC)

Hey, it's not that silly. Wikipedia is an excellent project, and longevity is a reasonable thing to want. I don't know of any current actual efforts in the direction described by Omegatron, but it's a good thing to think about.
Here's some related topics:

I don't know how KEO has determined that their data disks will last 50,000 years, but if they're right, Wikipedia could be backed up on the same sorts of disks. User:Jose_Icaza even suggested using Wikipedia itself as their "modern Library of Alexandria," but I don't know if anything became of that.
So there you go. If Jean-Marc Philippe can put 50,000-year-durable data disks with enormous amounts of information on a satellite with a decaying orbit, concievably so could we. Or we could try a more down-to-earth approach and try just keeping the disks on earth, eh? Maybe if Wikipedia becomes a sizeable enough phenomenon, the Smithsonian or some other organization might preserve a few disks for us.
PS: Another related topic: James Lovelock (the Gaia Theory originator) has apparently proposed that a "startup manual for civilization" be kept handy somewhere in the event of a global catastrophe. --Mr. Billion 19:16, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I have no idea how you'd doi t, and I think it's a good idea. But there's flaw: Wikipedia will be much more advanced by the time this backup is needed. The world isn't going to collapse as soon as this archive is made. HereToHelp 21:40, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Baseline revision[edit]

I have started a "baseline revision" experiment. I figure it overlaps with this effort. I have started off our first attempt to find a baseline revision for Common Unix Printing System. The proposal is here and is locked in to stop vandals from editing the URL to the revision: Common Unix Printing System/Proposed baseline. See the talk page to see the objections and review for the proposed baseline revision. - Ta bu shi da yu 03:14, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC) |

Audio articles[edit]

User:Fbd has made a suggestion on Village pump proposals (at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Audio Article) of creating audio versions of wikipedia articles, i.e. an edition accessible to the blind. This would obviously require static versions of the articles, so 1.0 would be ideal for this. I don't know how we would go about co-ordinating this or whether anyone has already tried. What do people think? --—Preceding unsigned comment added by User:SteveW (talk • contribs) 14:17, 8 Apr 2005

I think this is a good idea, but do we necessarily need static versions of the artices; what's the argument for this? Wouldn't a reasonably fresh version of a Featured Article suffice? — Matt Crypto 20:22, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I just meant that we obviously couldn't redo audio versions for every page update - we'd have to base it on a specific version. SteveW | Talk 20:28, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Someone else clearly had this idea as well: I've just found Wikipedia:WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia

Wikipedia 1.0 pretty much requires static versions. A problem even found with featured articles is, how do you know exactly which version is considered "validated" enough to be chosen to be the static version? I was just about to comment on this and suggest that Spoken Articles and their corresponding texts are excellent criteria for static versions, but y'all beat me to it. This is one pretty good way of determining the quality of an article, anyway: somebody who took the time to read an entire article aloud and then upload it as an .ogg would very likely pick a safe and reliable version. You can't easily change an audio file, so being a spoken article is a very good "safety" marker. All the average vandal wants to do is spend two seconds inserting OMG PWNED into an article to get a weird thrill.
Two problems, though: One, there are currently relatively few spoken articles, so this criterion wouldn't be widely applicable; and two, if spoken articles do become much more common, the chances of somebody either mistakenly or maliciously uploading a bad or flawed audio file will increase, reducing the value of this safety marker.
So as time goes on and there are multiple possible spoken article versions, we'll run into much the same problems that we have with text articles, although on a smaller scale. You'll still have to balance up-to-dateness, bias, and reliability. Mr. Billion 18:11, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

New goal idea[edit]

It occured to me a few hours ago, and I think it's totally brilliant (why wouln't I?).

A good milestone in the push to 1.0 might be this: every article in the m:List of articles all languages should have should be featured. Since these ~1000 articles represent, theoretically, some of the most important topics for us to cover, if they're all featured, it means good things for the quality of our encyclopaedia.

Current progress: we have 600 featured articles, 45 of which are on the list. The rest of the items on the list have not been promoted.

The featured articles that are on the list are: Abraham Lincoln - Albert Einstein - Algorithm - Bahá'í Faith - Baseball - Bicycle - Big Bang - Black hole - Buddhism - Byzantine Empire - Chess - Christianity - Coca-Cola - Comet - Diamond - Economics - Elizabeth I of England - Elizabeth II of England - Euro - European Union - Evolution - Ferdinand Magellan - Galileo Galilei - Glass - Go (board game) - Greek mythology - Helium - Hinduism - Jazz - Julius Caesar - Mahatma Gandhi - Niagara Falls - Olympic Games - Poetry - Quantum mechanics - Richard Feynman - Supply and demand - Tank - Tea - The Beatles - Tony Blair - Tuberculosis - Victoria of the United Kingdom - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - World War I

→Iñgōlemo← ^talk 07:00, 2005 May 19 (UTC)

Just a note that En.wikipedia's version is here: Wikipedia:List of articles all languages should have, the featured ones are bolded. Doesn't seem to be exactly the same as the meta version, eg meta has tuberculosis and bling (sigh). Kappa 07:57, 19 May 2005 (UTC)

Mandrake[edit]

"For instance, Mandrake requires us to remove all fair use images for legal reasons for their intended DVD release of Wikipedia."

Who is Mandrake? I haven't heard of this organization. Mr. Billion 19:42, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Mandrake Linux now Mandriva. Ericd 20:18, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Current status[edit]

Anyone knows what the current status is of this project? I think if we could get a Wikipedia 1.0 DVD/book it would create an amazing public awareness. The featured articles would be a good place to start since there's already 700 of them. Then we could create a list of topics of which articles we want to include (ie. all countries, history articles on every period, all science topics, etc) and work on the missing articles to get the best 10,000 or 100,000 or whichever. Also since all text is free, it doesn't have to be Jimbo behind the project, anyone with the time and resources could start making this happen. Elfguy 16:54, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

Be happy with a snapshot of Wikipedia[edit]

Elfguy, I like your recent comments (good one on 1.0 Editorial Team, too). I have two main things to say:

Take a snapshot and work from there - First of all, Wikipedia online will never be a very reliable source of information^{Michael Elkan}

Michael Elkan

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