Re: [Bug-gne]The slow death of GNE

[Hector Facundo Arena]

> Judging from Hector's mail, I would say GNE is dead or soon will be.
> You cannot have a successful project when the main sponsor of the
> project is not 100% committed to its ideals and to its successful
> completion. Clearly RMS is not. And Hector is not. Better to call it a
> day.

Well, I've been working for ten months on this project. We had all the
ideas in clear and we were ready to start working on it. But now, all
those ideas are part of Nupedia. So, there's notthing I can do.

> For the record, I do think there are differences between Nupedia and,
> at least from my viewpoint, GNE. Nuipedia is a very expert-led,
> academic exercise. GNE always seemed to be aiming for a broader brush
> with multiple non-peer reviewed articles on a single topic. Looking at
> the Nupedia website today, it is also still a project which solicits
> articles from people (you do volunteer to write them, but an editor
> decides if you are good enough). GNE was about unsolicited material.

Well, the main announcement of the GNU Encyclopedia talks about this last
part. But now RMS has changed his mind... he says that if there's enough
resources to make editorial control, we should use it. Perhaps he's
right... but that wasn't the original idea of my project.

> There is still space for a GNE project, in fact there is a need for
> one, but it needs a fully commited sponsor who is prepared to lead and
> to drive the project forward.

I agree. As I said, I'll keep this mailing list alive and, if you want, we
can make our own home page on the GNU servers. But I cannot fully lead
this project, because I didn't make the basic ideas of it (although I
agree). I have some people in mind to lead this project... but give me a
few days.

> Looking back over the last few weeks, my suspicion is that GNE was only
> ever politics and not a real project, just a way of applying pressure
> on Nupedia. I hope I'm wrong, but all the evidence to date does tend to
> point that way: the difference between the two projects is too wide to
> belive that the changes at Nupedia make GNE redundant. It reads more
> like RMS got what _he_ wanted out of Nupedia, and now GNE is being
> allowed to rumble on in the background with little urgency shown about
> its completion (or its demise).

Well, I don't agree. I like Nupedia and I like the Nupedia Project. As I
said to RMS, they have it everything well developed and they're ready to
go with GNU. So the best option for GNU was to adopt the Nupedia projecta
and *not* the old GNUPedia.

> I feel less well disposed towards GNU as a result of this exercise.

Well, you can feel however you want, but don't forget that GNU is a
community and in a community, anyone can make mistakes and anyone can say
'sorry'.

hfa