Is Monmouthpedia The Future Of Wikipedia?

One of the central questions the Wikipedia community grapples with is: What exactly is Wikipedia trying to achieve? For example, does it aspire to be a total encyclopedia of everything? What is the appropriate level of detail? 

On Techdirt.

Filtering an Inclusionist Wikipedia

Why didn't somebody think of this before?

Wikipedia for schools is ... a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia, targeted around the UK National Curriculum and useful for much of the English speaking world. The current version has about 5500 articles (as much as can be fit on a DVD with good size images) and is “about the size of a twenty volume encyclopaedia (34,000 images and 20 million words)”. It was developed by carefuly selecting for content, then checking for vandalism and suitability by “SOS Children volunteers”. You can download it for free from the website, or as a free 3.5GB DVD.

The following point is even more interesting:

I also see this as a potential future model for Wikipedia — allow people to edit, but have a separate vetting process that identifies particular versions of an article as vetted. Then, people can choose if they want to see the latest version or the most recent vetted version. To some, this is very controversial, but I don’t see it that way. A vetting process doesn’t prevent future edits, and it creates a way for people to get what they want... material that they can have increased confidence in. The trick is to develop a good-enough vetting process (or perhaps multiple vetting/rating processes for different purposes). This didn’t make sense back when Wikipedia was first starting (the problem was to get articles written at all!), but now that Wikipedia is more mature, it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s a new need to identify vetted articles. Yes, you have to worry about countries to whom “democracy” is a dirty word, but I think such problems can be resolved. This is hardly a new idea; see Wikimedia’s article on article validation and Wikipedia’s pushing to 1.0. I am sure that a vetting/validation process will take time to develop, and it will be imperfect... but that doesn’t make it a bad idea.

Indeed. What this means is that different organisations could pass the whole of Wikipedia through their particular prisms - like that filtering stuff for children. This is a very strong argument for Wikipedia being inclusionist - having as much stuff as possible - and letting the filters take out stuff that particular groups don't want. These would then offer their seals of approval to that particular cut - even if many people would disapprove of the choices made. That's freedom for you, I'm afraid.

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Includipedia - Count Us In

As I've written elsewhere, I am a big fan of inclusionism when it comes to Wikipedia - the idea that there is no good reason why it shouldn't include entries on anything. After all, nobody forces you to read the stuff, and it's not as if it's sitting on your bookshelves. Includipedia feels the same:

The main difference between Includipedia and Wikipedia is that Includipedia will have an Inclusionst policy.

When people's work is trashed by deletionists, they become discouraged from contributing to Wikipedia. If many good Wikipedia editors get disgruntled with Wikipedia's deletionists, the important work of creating a repository of all information is harmed.

Why shouldn't every film, every TV programme episode, every small-circulation magazine, every pokemon character, etc have an article about it, if people want to write those articles? People who aren't interested in these subjects won't read them, and people who are interested will find them useful.

Also worth noting is Encoresoup, an partial, inclusionist version of Wikipedia all about free software:

The goal of Encoresoup is to provide a comprehensive reference guide to virtually all Free Software and Open Source projects and the FOSS ecosystem.

The core and inspiration for Encoresoup is the set of Wikipedia's FOSS articles managed by the Free Software WikiProject. Encoresoup seeks to build on and enhance this content in the following ways :

* Include many more articles. Practically any Free/Open Source Software project can be documented here (but see our inclusion policy) and we hope one day to host articles covering the vast majority of projects.