One of the positive things to come from our prominence has been the
rise of similar subject-specific resources - many clustered around
Wikia, but not all. For any supporter of free culture it is a deeply
heartening thing to see a genuine focus on creating free content for a
variety of purposes.
There are obvious benefits to finding ways to work closely with these
projects. For one thing, it promotes free culture, and that is our
goal. For another, these projects often fill in gaps in our coverage.
It's a simple fact of life that our most-read articles are often ones
on fictional subjects. And we have major controversies in this area as
people seek to restrain our coverage due to notability. If we can
interface ourselves with fan wikis for various shows we can also
better police the boundary between what we want to cover and what we
don't want to cover without leaving our readers short-changed.
In fact, this is often a major argument raised in notability
discussions - if people want plot summaries they should go to X Wiki.
Years ago, I created
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:FreeContentMeta
to help with this - it was a base template that could be used to
create sister-project like boxes for other wikis. This let us, on
fictional characters, have a link much like we have for Wikiquote or
Wikisource that basically said "If you want detailed in-universe
information, here's where to go." This struck me as common sense - it
helped with the problem of getting readers to expect us to provide
what we actually provide, it helped editors have a better sense of
where to put different types of information, and it helped free
content by creating prominent and crawlable links to free content
resources (since Wikia is on the interwiki map, and thus links are not
nofollow).
Unfortunately, the templates are pretty near to being deprecated with
no real replacement in mind. This strikes me as very, very unfortunate
- the attitude, which seems to be that we ought never promote
anything, ever, and that we have no obligation to help other free
content resources, seems to me both a case of pulling up the ladder
and of situating ourselves as a walled garden. We want people to go to
other resources instead of us, but we are unwilling, it seems, even to
tightly integrate with those resources to make that leap easy for
readers. The idea that we have an obligation to help free culture is
roundly and dismissively rejected, and the very idea of providing
prominent links to free content sites is decried as an NPOV violation
(though nobody, to date, has explained what viewpoint it unfairly
advances...)
What can or should we do in this area? How can we best use the
existence of a much larger galaxy of free content resources to improve
ourselves and improve them? What role do we play in the larger free
culture community? Are we a walled garden that is only to be imitated?
Or are we the leaders who can and should use our prominence and our
muscle to help create free sources of knowledge for anything that
people want to know?
For me, this is a no-brainer. So how do we do it?
Best,
Phil