Ceasar
State the mission of the project
This is an obvious argument against writing one's own encyclopedia. A refutation is in order.
It may be helpful to begin here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia
I don't think you even need to criticize Wikipedia (though you surely can) as much as show off what you can do here that's not appropriate for an encyclopedia-for-all.
I didn't specify the issue clearly. I should have written "Argue why Wikipedia is insufficient for X". I'm not certain what X is though. I'll rename this to "state the mission of the project", and then part of the argument will then include "criticize Wikipedia as it relates to X".
Very roughly, my goal for the project seems to be to create the best tool for studying independently. More concretely this seems to include:
- Creating a store of information you can completely trust (since you wrote it yourself, hopefully in a timeless fashion). It should only be wrong if you learn new information which changes your conclusions, in which case you should update it. There should be ways to indicate how much you trust certain pieces of information as well.
- Creating a workspace for discovering areas of a topic that you don't understand. (e.g. you can begin by defining a term, then you can talk about the etymology, its history, its matter and form, etc.). Ideally with usage it could help you think better about anything.
- Create a tool to aid recall. This comes in two forms: (1) discovering related ideas that you can make connections to, to generate new areas of research, and (2) simply finding relevant documents that you wrote when you have a question about something you've studied. This is definitely a huge part; I cannot tell you how many books I've read which I now completely forget the contents of.
- Create a tool that lets you encode information quickly. Right now, the advantages over most wikis and note systems are (1) that you can edit via the command line (with a text editor) (which could become incredibly powerful with the use of scripts and custom grammar checkers) and (2) that you write in restructuredtext, which is both easy to read and write.
The target audience should be people who want to study things deeply, perhaps, for instance, including power users of Evernote; the goal here is less of being a filedump and more of creating a tool to help people study new things and not forget old things.