[WikiEN-l] The viable competitors to Wikipedia.

[WereSpielChequers]

We already have several rivals, including the Chinese,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_Baike and the largest online
encyclopaedia Hudong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudong At some
point in the near future translation software will improve to the
point that they can compete against us in languages other than
Chinese. Also I suspect we are already losing ground to more
inclusionist projects such as IMDB.

We will still have a niche in languages they aren't interested in, and
among people who care about copyright. But my suspicion is that we are
unusual, and that most potential editors are more annoyed by having
their contributions rejected by deletionists than by something in the
small print that says their words now belong to the website they've
written them on.

Willingness to adapt to the desires of National Governments and even
cultural prejudices also creates niches in much if not most of the
world. I've no idea how good Chinese to Arabic translation software
is, but the combination of an adequate translation and a filter agreed
with relevant governments or religions would probably beat us in the
Arab world. I don't like the idea of political censorship, but I do
like the idea of enabling people to make their own choices as to what
they see. If our user preferences included two stick figures and a
sliding bar that enabled every option from burka to thongless then my
personal choice need not concern others any more than theirs mattered
to me.

Other interesting niches would be for a "child safe", unscientific or
mono-dialect encyclopaedias. I'm not convinced that the young earth
creationists with their American English at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia or the Australian English
equivalent at http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/Main_Page are
sufficiently mainstream to do this, let alone the absolutist flat
earthers at http://conservapedia.wikkii.com/wiki/Main_Page But I
suspect that a mainstream trusted brand could find a niche here,
perhaps even with a bowdlerised mirror of Wikipedia.

I've seen many newbies get an early warning by starting their wiki
career "correcting" articles to the version of English that they are
comfortable with, and I'd like to see us resolve this by making
display dialect a user preference
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:More_multi_dialect_wikis I
think this would have a secondary benefit that identifying and
appropriately marking ambiguous words such as bonnet, hood and fender
would make it easier to translate those articles into other languages.

Other options would be for a site that ended the
inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and
concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That
seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to
specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is
one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold
somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea
pigs.

WereSpielChequers