On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 8:14 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dal...@gmail.com>wrote: > > While I can't imagine how I managed it now, I don't remember > struggling with browsing Wikipedia on a 56K modem. In fact, I think I > browsed it on a 36.6K modem... If it is what you are used to, it > really doesn't seem that bad.
As long as you can download an article (with images) faster than you can read it, it at least serves the basic purpose of providing access to knowledge. But in my opinion Wikipedia (like any encyclopedia) is an absolutely terrible source of knowledge standing alone. An encyclopedia can provide a broad outline of a topic to evaluate which topics you are interested in learning more about, point you to some resources for further reading, and remind you of the answer to some specific questions as they come up, but an encyclopedia cannot stand alone. Education requires access to the rest of the library as well. And it also requires things that probably won't be found in any library (or Wikibook). How to bribe the local police comes to mind. And then there's the whole world which is excluded from Wikimedia projects for being allegedly "POV". Perhaps if the definition of "POV" had been better designed this wouldn't be such a problem, but considering that WP:POV says such things as "Hard facts are really rare", I think it's quite obvious NPOV knowledge is not sufficient. So unless you're going to create a very targeted library for each individual, I think that means full internet access (even that is quite incomplete though, especially if you ignore non-free resources like e-books and audiobooks). Going through all the trouble of providing a netbook and wireless connection and then crippling it to only be capable of accessing Wikipedia (and presumably the rest of the Wikimedia sites) would be incredibly wasteful. If full Internet access is too expensive for one individual, have it shared among many. If even that is too expensive, probably because sufficient sharing is infeasible due to low population density, then the solution should be explicitly temporary. Enough generalities, though. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
