To the extent that the enWP is a project to build a practical encyclopedia, it seems to have been getting increased acceptance as it gets larger. There is no indication that this trend is ceasing or or even faltering.
To the extent that WP is an experiment, the experiment has already succeeded beyond the limits of similar projects, and there is no reason to stop at this point. Predictions that there would be a size beyond which it no longer scales have so far all of them been wrong. Splitting the encyclopedia is irreversible--we can always decide to split, but it is very unlikely that after sections develop separately they will be able to recombine. But there is nothing to stop anyone from making a split if they desire while leaving the actual Wikipedia as it is. I think WP can only benefit from serious competition. I agree the role of the wikiprojects should be increased and perhaps formalized, but already over the last few years at the enWP, some of the various WikiProjects and less organized impromptu groups of people interested in various aspects have made decisions that the community has not supported. There is an advantage in having an Encyclopedia with uniform policies that have general agreement--people read it as a whole & have common expectations. And with respect to BLPs, the biographical information about living people permeates most areas of the Encyclopedia, not just the articles with a living person's name as the title. On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 7:33 PM, John Vandenberg <[email protected]> wrote: > Was: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay) > Was: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness > > On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Ryan Kaldari <[email protected]> wrote: >> On 2/25/11 3:11 PM, John Vandenberg wrote: >>> On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 11:18 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> .. >>>> I think it could also be considered to divide our huge language wikis >>>> into smaller parts. The existing WikiProjects could be made virtual wikis >>>> with their own admins, recent changes etc. That way, each project is in >>>> fact like a small wiki to which the newbie could sign up according to >>>> 'hers' area of interest and where the clarrity and friendlier atmosphere >>>> of the smaller wikis could prevail. >>> >>> This is the best solution, in my opinion. >> >> Yes, the larger wikis need to become WikiProject-centric. First step in >> doing this would be to create a WikiProject namespace. Second step would >> be to make WikiProject article tagging/assessment part of the software >> instead of template-based. > > I can see how those would be useful steps, however I think those steps > are part of a 10 year plan. > > A 10 year plan will be overrun by events. > > We need a much more direct plan. > > I recommend breaking enWP apart by finding easy chunks and moving them > to a separate instance, and having readonly copies on the main project > like we do for File: pages from Commons. > > IMO, the simplest and most useful set of articles to break apart is BLPs. > The criteria is really simple, and those articles already have lots of > policy differences around them. > > By the time we have perfected this system with the BLPs, the community > will have come to understand the costs/benefits of moving other > clusters of articles to separate projects, and we'll see other > clusters of articles migrated to sub-projects. > > btw, this idea is not new, but maybe its time has come. > http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=29729 > > -- > John Vandenberg > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > [email protected] > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > -- David Goodman DGG at the enWP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
