On 11/16/06, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
I think that giving Wikia preferential treatment in terms of link placement and appearance - particularly using templates that might be readily confused with sister project ones by the casual visitor, but really by any means - isn't a very good idea. Despite the personal connections, Wikia isn't really an adjunct of Wikimedia; there's no reason to treat links there any differently than we would external links to any other non-Wikimedia site.
To be clear, the boxes are not inherently tied to Wikia, though one imagines that Wikia would form the majority of such links just by virtue of its role as the main hoster of free content wikis. The template does favor MediaWiki, but this is mostly because it was easy for me to code that way. And, actually, I still needed help getting it to work right. If there are resources done in other software besides MediaWiki that we should be linking to, someone should make a box that works for them.
This is not, to my mind, a bias towards Wikia, but towards free content in general. I think it is perfectly reasonable for us to provide prominant links to other free content resources - particularly ones that cover substantially different types of material from Wikipedia. Especially if doing so helps to alleviate a fundamental schism within the community that we currently are suffering.
-Phil