Wikipedia talk:WikiBiblion

Btw, we need a way of distinguishing pages on something from pages that are the things themselves - for instance, a summary of how the US constitution works versus its text.

If I had to venture an opinion, I guess we should restrict ourselves to texts that might be commonly cited and useful for immediate reference. For example, a discussion of the US constitution is probably much enhanced by being able to link directly to the relevant amendment. For example, in an article on GunControl, someone surely might find it useful to link to United States Constitution/Amendment Two.

The same goes for the Bible, as many articles on aspects of JudeoChristian culture might usefully link to a chapter here and there.

But MobyDick, for example, isn't so usefully quoted, and so sticking it all in here just to be doing it seems more pointless.

But, like you said, it really just depends on what people bother to type (or cut and paste) in. :-)

Larry, I like your text but I think it belongs among the articles rather than the source texts, since I would read it to understand philosophy rather than to understand it. Similarly for the essay. TimShell's notes might not be ideal either, but I put them in because they are close to having a copy of AtlasShrugged. The idea was, though, that the things listed are special by necessary correctness and immutability, and we are studying them rather than reading them to understand something else, so they are sort of exempt from wikipedianess.

I see, but the usefulness of this page is increased by expanding its scope so as to keep a record of where massive amounts of new data are added to the wiki. This would encourage others to do the same. -- Larry Sanger

My problem with the whole thing is - if the Wikipedia is freely editable, doesn't including source material contradict that entirely? I mean, if we include the Bible, can I rewrite the bits I don't like? Project Gutenberg is in an untouchable format, which makes a lot more sense. Also why compete for turf? Project Gutenberg is doing a nice job, and that is their sole focus - we've got more than enough to do just trying to achieve our primary aim. - MMGB - Hey, that might be fun! Rewrite the Bible by putting it up in Wiki format! We could argue for hours about the best way of rewriting each and every passage! ;-) -- SJK - Manning: see Wikipedia commentary/Project Sourceberg for some of my ideas on the topic. The basic idea is to figure out a better way of working with PG so that we can take advantage of each other's resources. Then there are some possible implementations.

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I've already removed a number of the source texts pointed to by this article, most notably Shakespeare and Poe stuff, and I think a lot of other stuff needs to be culled from here to. Works of fiction especially, but most of the nonfiction is also not appropriate for Wikipedia (due to the editability, among other things). But I'll go slow in culling things, in case anyone objects to my removals. Bryan Derksen, Saturday, April 13, 2002

Thank you for doing the heavy lifting here Bryan -- I really never did understand the utility of placing entire works of fiction, laws, or other works into the 'pedia. These documents are only useful if a reader can be reasonably confident that what is on the screen is what the original author said. We are not in the business of rewriting Shakespeare here or even the Bible (although many would love the opportunity). I was the one who wrote What Wikipedia is not #12 and am glad somebody strongly agrees with me on this. BTW, it is probably an almost certainty that some people have bookmarked many of these articles mainly because they contained primary source material. It should be easy to find a good link to a pdf file containing the source material by copying some of the wikipedia text into google and performing an exact search. It might also be nice to have a one line statement asking contributors not to dump public domain text onto the 'pedia -- similar to what has been done for the disambiguation pages. Just a thought... links to the primary text really should be inputed whenever culling though. maveric149, Sunday, April 14, 2002


 * Good point, I'll see if I can find sources for the other stuff I've deleted before I proceed with these other ones. Bryan Derksen