Bruder wrote:Thu 1 January 1970 3:59 pm
That sounds like a good idea to revive that wiki. I would participate in such a project.
Agreed that it would be good.
Now personally I don't know that much about running public websites, nor is this a good country to run one from. (Expensive, slow, and in principle easy to have shut down by any interest groups.)
My thoughts from seeing many such sites stagnate and die, is that it is precisely the forking process which seems appealing but ends up being their undoing. Almost nobody goes to Infogalactic to see the same info which was already up on Wikipedia, just as almost nobody went to TO wiki to see the same info which was already up on Orthodox Wiki. Search engines also derank sites which largely duplicate other sites.
Worse, the idea of saving work by copying over most info ironically creates more work. Once the fork is created and a few small changes made, now all those pages either stagnate or get periodically updated with new imports from the original source. Every import has to be checked and merged into the local changes. Overall a large amount of effort for no real benefit, which makes the site invisible to searches.
Hence if it gets revived then for what my opinion is worth (very little), the aim should not be to duplicate OW with a few minor changes but rather to write a new site focussing first and foremost on that information which is not already adequately covered elsewhere. Of course one can still write an article on the topic if one sees fit regardless if there are other good articles out there.
If it has lots of links and references this site could serve as a general information centre. Very important in the medium term, I think, given that Orthodox Info is already in maintenance-only mode and websites do not last forever.
I have plenty of work to keep myself busy and I owe Fr. Joseph some favours as well. I'm not that knowledgable; I'm just some guy who left Calvinists only to figure out eventually that the Orthodoxy I found isn't all that orthodox. However I can probably help in some capacity.
The question is who would run such a site and how would it be cleared with his bishop, given that the intent would be general information not specific to the viewpoint of one synod, and may include facts that could be embarrassing to that synod. Not that I even have a bishop. (The patriarchate doesn't count.)
