Ryan Lomonaco wiki.ral315@gmail.com wrote:
I don't see how that would be an issue. Notability is not a foundation policy, it's a community guideline that was enacted by editors of the English Wikipedia. Other projects within the WMF family would not necessarily be subject to the same standards, in the same way that the Spanish Wikipedia does not allow fair use images while the English Wikipedia does.
This is an excellent point that gets to the heart of the divergence problems between Wikipedia's and Wikimedia's respective purposes. The difference though is that Wikimedia serves Wikipedia - not the other way around. Wikipedia's success itself came largely from being able to confine its scope and its mission toward dealing with issues of substance and not so much ideas about fluff - popular as that fluff may be.
But I agree that Wikimedia is not so encumbered with principles as Wikipedia, and thus it can take on projects that deal with non-encyclopedic content. (In fact this unencumberance allows for some degree of allowance for non-encyclopedic content on even Wikipedia - see Commons for example). You have to understand the objection here though - which is that we inevitably find that Wikipedia will conflict with any other Wikimedia projects if their priorities are too different.
Wikipedia is more than just Wikimedia's flagship project, and its encyclopedic and journalistic principles have a priority that far exceeds its own "wiki."
-Stevertigo