On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 12:17 AM, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Aug 28, 2008, at 7:29 PM, Matthew Brown wrote:
On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 4:19 PM, Luna lunasantin@gmail.com wrote:
The description provided strikes me as more than a tad sensationalist. I've yet to see any serious proposal to stop linking to these other projects, only a number of people wondering why we're not using the standard external link style to do so.
Why don't we use the standard external link style to link to other WMF projects, then?
I wonder this very much.
Memory Alpha is a better site with higher quality control than Wikiquote, much of Wikibooks, and the bulk of Wikiversity.
Why not treat a site like it as the fantastic free resource that it is?
-Phil
Wikiquote, Wikisource, et al. are all, at least nominally, part of the same project. Indeed, we occasionally direct link words to Wiktionary that not all readers should be expected to know. (For instance, I'm writing a biography of Peter Jones these days, and linked proselytizing to Wiktionary as a three dollar word I wouldn't expect all readers to know). At the end of the day, who'd put up with a comparable link to dictionary.com?
Freeness is a wonderful attribute, but the honest truth is that it's of virtually zero value to our readers. By and large, they care about gratis, but not libre. Do we try to impose our ideology that way? Are external links for editors, rather than readers, who necessarily care more about freeness?
If it's just internal navigation/external navigation, then it's just internal projects and external projects. If there's a different scheme, there should be a clear reason why a reader cares about free vs. unfree.
Brian