On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 1:45 PM, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Aug 29, 2008, at 7:47 AM, Wily D wrote:
Wikiquote, Wikisource, et al. are all, at least nominally, part of the same project.
Are they? I mean, is that true from a community perspective, or a WMF perspective?
Both, I think. I'm the same User:WilyD on English Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Commons, and this carries around a bit. I don't think that my using the same name elsewhere is relevant, whether it's uncyclopedia or espn.com. Those are "different" mes, somehow. (Me doesn't pluralise well.)
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 we're going for a readerly argument, fine - do away with our cruft and notability guidelines. As it's also clear that we have readers who want coverage of things we're hesitant to provide.
I don't think I have the power to do this. But if we can't hope to write a good, neutral article about something, we probably shouldn't. There's some value in notability guidelines, and cruft guidelines in the "keep things readable" regime. That it's overextended is neither here nor there.
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.
Again, though, internal to what? I would suggest that on [[Han Solo]] there is more overlap between the editors and readers of it and the Wookiepedia page on Han Solo than there is between the editors and readers of it and the Wikiquote page.
And yet one gets a colored box, and the other doesn't.
-Phil
As it stands now, this is definitely the case, though. Other wikimedia projects are internal partners. Picking external partners is fraught with problems.
We probably stand to get ourselves and the foundation in trouble if we treat Wikia as someone internal to WMF (or vice versa). If there's a missing functionality, the correct answer is probably "Propose a new project". Wikicompendium, or something.
Brian