Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 17:09, 20 August 2003

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.

Some questions, though, are outside the scope of this particular page. Should we drive to 1.0? Should we strive to create a paper-friendly version? These are interesting questions, I suppose, but outside the scope of what I want to do here, which is to assume that the answers to those are affirmative.

Please note: I plan to refactor this page heavily as we go along! I intend for this to be somewhere between an 'unowned' wiki page and a 'personal' page of mine. Please don't be offended, and if you have a personal rant you'd like to include (and please do!), possibly it will be best to put it in your own userspace and just link it from here.

I may also sometimes post versions of this to the mailing list.

Some of the basic ideas that I've had so far:

• Misplaced Pages 1.0 should be about as good as Britannica -- better in some ways, worse in some ways, but a valid alternative

• The push for Misplaced Pages 1.0 should interfere as minimally as possible with the ongoing work on the website

• Misplaced Pages 1.0 is just Misplaced Pages 1.0 -- by this I mean that we don't need to come up with a perfect system for all time, and that we should be prepared to learn from our mistakes on 1.0 as we, in the future, drive towards 1.1, 1.2, or 2.0

• Misplaced Pages 1.0 should be primarily about producing a single end product that is suitable for printers to print, cheaply. This will mean that we'll want to work for a state such that a printer could receive a CD-ROM from me in the mail and start producing books as easily as possible. I have no idea right now what this would involve, frankly.

• Misplaced Pages the website should remain just as it is, but it is likely that Misplaced Pages 1.0 is going to require some degree of more formality and controls. These should be kept to a minimal level! We want to preserve the maximum possible openness while at the same time doing what needs doing to ensure that approved versions of articles are actually quite good.

• As a working hypothesis, let's talk about this project as though we intend to finish by December 31st, 2004, just over a year from now. This should not be considered an announcement of a goal date, just yet! As we put together a more formal idea of what needs doing, we can refine the date. But my own estimate, based on the need to approve around 75,000 articles, is that we can do it by then. Comments?

'Things We Need To Do

• Clarify our goals with a set of specifications for the end product

• Create a procedure and some minimal policies (which will surely change with experience)

• Come up with a (likely bogus, but still inspiring) timeline for tasks to be completed

• Specify some default public domain sources, like 1911 British encyclopedia.

• What else? Add things here...