Looking for a perl monkey

Hullo, I'm writing this on behalf of a GNU project called GNE (GNE's Not an Encyclopedia), with the purpose of recruiting the help of a perl monkey or two.

GNE (or what used to be called GNUPedia) is like an online library. After GNU successfully created a base range of Free Software, and initiated a movement that has ensured, at least for the time being, some freedoms in the software world, it has decided to branch out into the world of knowledge as a whole. It wants to start creating a large resource of "knowledge" released under a Free lisence to ensure people can access well-written articles on any number of topics for free, and without any restrictions on the use of information.

The project has been going on and off for about half a year, perhaps more, now. But for the past few months it's been pretty much dead in the water, having only myself (a relative Perl newbie) to do the actual coding once we figured out the structure. So now I'm looking for one or two people to come and help write the code properly.

The structure is fairly simple. It uses MySQL and Perl to provide a web interface to a kind of "online library". People can freely view this library (though of course a search/browse engine needs to be built!). People can also sign up and then submit articles. These articles are then put in a pool, which can be viewed by moderators (people working on the project, and people who have contributed three articles recently). If two moderators deem the article to be readable and interesting, it gets accepted into the main resource. A fairly simple, self-regulating system. Not too hard to code, but we need it to be well done and secure.

We want the system to go live within the next few months for testing with politics articles (I have a collection of writers waiting), and then within a year we want to announce it to the other academic communities.

If anybody is interested in lending a hand, please send me an email at tomchance AT gmx DOT net with an indication as to your Perl experience, and how much you can help.

Cheers

This is an interesting project.

How does it differ from www.wikipedia.com ?

E.g. why would one get involved with GNE rather than wikipedia?

(truly curious, not trying to be antagonistic)

Wikipedia developed as an offshoot from Nupedia, which was called GNUPedia. GNE also developed as an offshoot from GNUPedia. So although they do seem quite similar, there are differences which I'll briefly outline...

Nupedia is an encyclopedia, which means it contains articles only deemed to be factually accurate. It has a rigorous vetting process for articles, which means they are of high quality in the eyes of the editors.

Wikipedia is also an encyclopedia, which means it is supposed to contain factually accurate entries. But the vetting process for articles is extremely open, encouraging people to add and alter entries to get a kind of community consensus on entries.

GNE is more of a library, which means it contains articles on any subject that may be entirely factual or entirely opinionated, rather like an academic journal (e.g. New Scientist). The vetting process is somewhere between Nupedia and Wikipedia, aiming to allow all kinds of opinions without letting "yo momma" articles or flame articles in.

So really the three projects fit together quite nicely. All three will probably in time be returned under the umbrella of GNU's "Free Universal Learning Resource", which GNUPedia started under. One would get involved with GNE rather than the other two simply because one thought GNE was more interesting, or one wanted a bigger role in the programming (as the other two projects have far more programmers, which isn't hard because as it stands GNE has gone down to one - me!).

Hope that answers your question :-)