RE: [Bug-gnupedia] Nupedia

[Duncan Lock]

Hi,
        I agree that a GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) free for all
encyclopaedia/library is an interesting idea. I expect you would end up with
more of a library/repository rather than 'an encyclopaedia' this way but
that's not necessarily a bad thing.
        What I attempted to suggest earlier was that the GNU people create a
generic, flexible, open source platform for creating and running free GFDL
encyclopaedias. I envisaged this project creating a set of tools and
software to enable anyone to host an open-source 'encyclopaedia' or
'library' or 'content repository'. Lets call this project the 'GNU Open
Content Framework' for the sake of argument. (This project could use the
tools developed by nupedia as a starting point, possibly.) It would be nice
if the 'GNU Open Content Framework' had the capability to automate mirroring
of itself and to link projects using the framework into a coherent whole; a
single meta-library, if you like. This starts to stray into freenet/ www v.2
type of territory though.
        I then suggested that projects like nupedia could use the 'GNU Open
Content Framework' to run/host/manage their encyclopaedia; so could anyone
else. Weather these content projects shared none, some, or all of their
content would be up to them.

        I apologise if I didn't explain things very well last time (or this
time either :-)

        I suspect that a lot of the tools to do this are pretty much there
(things like greenstone, perl, mysql, python, zope, apache, php, xml, linux
etc) and would only need assembling into a ready to use tailored platform to
achieve the above.

Any thoughts?

Dunc.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden
> Behalf Of Bob Dodd
> Sent: 19 January 2001 2:16
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: [Bug-gnupedia] Nupedia
> Well, it is in principal possible to combine the projects 
> (butr not the
> submission routes), I think Duncan has already suggested merging the
> database side of things: it's certainly one of our strengths, and we
> would both benefit from sharing articles (there's nothing 
> Nupedia could
> submit that we would reject, and the quality would generally be very
> high...) and Nupedia would get a decent mirrored database out of it.