On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 6:23 PM, David Goodman <[email protected]> wrote:
> We can do it right. > We can do it free of advertising. We can do it verified. We can do it > multi-national. We can do it in a single large open community. We can > do it without the uncertainty of city wikis, with their small > contributor base. > These are all excellent reasons to start new Wikimedia projects. > We can use it not just for additional material, but to relieve some of > the disputes on Wikipedia about the inclusion of local information > such as bus routes and local dignitaries. It can satisfy the > inclusionists, because the material will be included. it will satisfy > the deletionists, because it won't be included in the primary layer. > It will help newcomers, because it will give them easy things to write > about. > The latter is also valuable. Having young projects that meaningfully contribute to the sum of all knowledge in your language is helpful; perhaps we should actively send newbies to such projects to get their feet wet. > There is a considerable hostility among many Wikipedia people with > respect to Wikia, partly for historical/interpersonal reasons, and > partly because of their extreme contamination with advertisements, and > the almost total lack of standards of verifiability. > For my part, I'm relieved that there is a free-content place where anyone can start a wiki about anything - which also relieves many notability disputes. One value to having Wikias on topics not currently considered notable or in scope for WM projects is that, if a new project is formed or standards change, that body of existing work can be copied over (and verified and cited) to seed it. I agree it will take some planning: one basic question which you > allude to is whether it is meant as Wikipedia Local, or to include > hobbyist material as well. > > And perhaps it will be more used than some of the other splits. > We are REALLY HARSH on our smaller projects. New project topics are not 'splits'. They are invitations to gather more and different kinds of knowledge in a scalable way. Even Wikispecies, which most people acknowledge has a lot to learn from the shiny multimillion-dollar pro-curated Encyclopedia of Life, gets 300,000 hits a day, more than its more professional cousin. So: people use Wikimedia sites a lot. Our brand means something, as does our comprenehsive and meaningful use of internal links. We are a tremendous force for dissemination of knowledge, and should be aware of that - adding a new sphere of knowledge to the scope of what the Projects together try to accomplish has implications for millions of future readers. SJ _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
