On 11/16/06, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
I think there's good reason to believe that a significant number of people who might be inclined to contribute to Wikipedia would refuse to contribute to a Wikia project (see the various debates over ads on Wikipedia, etc.). Thus, two questions:
- Is the primary goal here to remove in-universe content from
Wikipedia - without too much thought being given to where exactly it ends up - or to create a well-defined off-Wikipedia place for in-universe content, with the associated removal of such material from Wikipedia being merely a side effect?
The latter - the goal of removing in-universe content does not work - too many people are too willing to revert such material, and attempts to fix these articles rarely stand.
- If the goal is the latter, how significant are the drawbacks of
using Wikia (as opposed to a Wikimedia project) as a place to move the material? (In particular, how likely is the appearance of forks over financial issues, and how harmful would the resulting divisions in the community of contributors be?)
Because it's easier to create the box than to fly another Wikimedia project. Furthermore, despite the possibilities of a conflict of interest, I, at least, would have serious issues with creating a Wikimedia project that competed with a number of projects on Wikia. There are good free content resources for fictional universes - we have very little to gain by throwing our weight around to compete with them.
-Phil