[Wikipedia-l] Transwiki

[Ray Saintonge]

The following is a point that I raised with Angela as part of my attempt 
to deal with what I see as the ongoing problem of Votes for Deletion.  I 
would like to seek constructive solutions to that.


When it comes to deletions my first rule would always be to resolve the 
benefit of the doubt in favour of keeping.  Secondly I would put delete 
only when an article falls squarely into a specified category.  The 
first two (and there would be others) clear categories would be
    (a) Obvious bad-faith nonsens such as infantile comments, alphabet 
soup and insults (the kind we all know when we see it), and
    (b) Clear tyupographical errors in an article title

The general class of articles that I want to consider now is that of 
those articles that belong in another member project of the Wikimedia 
family. Such an article will likely have valuable information, but the 
contributor has just put it in the wrong place. That group has a number 
of number of possible sub-classes:

   1. dictionary type entries; (They belong in Wiktionary)
   2. foreign language entries: (They belong in the Wiktionary for the
      relevant language)
   3. entire quoted books; (They belong in Wikibooks)
   4. memorials; (They belong in what is now the 9/11 Memorial, which
      could be expanded to cover forgetable victims of other disasters)

One observation that I have about the current listing of things to be 
transferred to Wiktionary is that it is somewhat useless where it is. A 
person that devotes his entire Wiki time to work on Wiktionary may not 
see it and may not even know that it's there. To solve this I would 
propose a Transwiki: 
<http://en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Transwiki:&action=edit> 
namespace on all projects. I first thought of using the word "Transfer" 
for this, but decided that a coined word would avoid any possible 
ambiguities. Currently Thou <http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou> is the 
first entry on Wikipedia:Things to be moved to Wiktionary 
<http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Things_to_be_moved_to_Wiktionary> 
. To deal with this I would create an article in Wiktionary called 
[[Transwiki:Thou]] to which everything that is now in Thou 
<http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou> could be copied as is. A 
Wiktionarian who is looking for something to do could then work at 
co-ordinating that article with what really should be on Wiktionary 
according to Wiktionary rules. Once that is done the Transwiki article 
could be deleted.

Since this idea can be applied to transfers between any two projects, I 
would suggest that the name "Transwiki" be applied uniformly across all 
projects.  This is important for foreign language entries   That way a 
worker in the source project will know exactly where to put something in 
the target project without knowing anything about the target language.

Ec