On 11/16/06, Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
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.
While the boxes may not be Wikia-oriented in design, their _practical_ effect will primarily be to add prominent links to Wikia. Better access to a useful free content resource is good, of course, but we ought to be very careful about avoiding the appearance of a conflict of interest in how we present Wikia to readers.
(This would get much worse, incidentally, if we were actually to adopt a policy of moving material from Wikipedia to Wikia in a forcible manner.)
As far as alleviating the schism: while driving the contributors interested in adding in-universe coverage of fiction off to another site would, indeed, get rid of the dispute, I'm not sure that it would be a particularly good solution. For one thing, we can expect that a significant portion of the potential Wikipedia contributors on a topic will refuse to become Wikia contributors on that topic because of the differences between the two.