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
Yes, let's lighten up a bit. Wikitravel never seemed a problem, why not others?
Fred
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
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Well, to be fair, we do put Wikitravel below the Wikimedia sister projects by just linking it normally in external links. What I'm proposing is more that other quality free content resources get treated like WMF projects, instead of treating the WMF content as special and holy. Especially because, frankly, there's more community overlap between us and some of the fan wikis, at least in the specific pages that they'd be linked from, than there is between us and Wikiquote on any given page that links there.
And the fan wikis are generally higher quality than Wikiquote too.
-Phil
On Aug 28, 2008, at 4:22 PM, Fred Bauder wrote:
Yes, let's lighten up a bit. Wikitravel never seemed a problem, why not others?
Fred
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
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
I very much agree with you, Phil. If Wikipedia would rather be other things than comprehensive, which in the last couple of years appears to be the case, it only makes sense to prominently link to places with different criteria and tradeoffs to us but with free-content licenses, especially if they're other Wikis.
It'd be one thing if we didn't want to look elsewhere because we wanted to have everything. It's IMO hypocritical in the extreme to be with one hand saying that there are whole swathes of factual content that we don't want, and with the other saying that no, we won't link to those other places either. If we won't give readers what they're looking for by policy (written or de-facto), we should at the very least show them where they CAN go for it.
I also see no good reason why it's not OK to, for instance, prominently refer readers to Memory Alpha but fine to link to Wikiquote. Favoritism towards WMF projects is not defensible, I think.
-Matt
The description provided strikes me as more than a tad sensationalist. I've yet to see any serious proposal to stop linking to these other projects, only a number of people wondering why we're not using the standard external link style to do so.
-Luna
On Aug 28, 2008, at 7:19 PM, Luna wrote:
The description provided strikes me as more than a tad sensationalist. I've yet to see any serious proposal to stop linking to these other projects, only a number of people wondering why we're not using the standard external link style to do so.
I did not mean to give the impression that we were delinking, and in fact corrected Fred when he implied that.
Regardless. We could do more than bury them in external links sections.
-Phil
On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 4:19 PM, Luna lunasantin@gmail.com wrote:
The description provided strikes me as more than a tad sensationalist. I've yet to see any serious proposal to stop linking to these other projects, only a number of people wondering why we're not using the standard external link style to do so.
Why don't we use the standard external link style to link to other WMF projects, then?
-Matt
How do we choose what external sites we give special preference to?
Brian
On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 7:29 PM, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 4:19 PM, Luna lunasantin@gmail.com wrote:
The description provided strikes me as more than a tad sensationalist. I've yet to see any serious proposal to stop linking to these other projects, only a number of people wondering why we're not using the standard external link style to do so.
Why don't we use the standard external link style to link to other WMF projects, then?
-Matt
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Right now, it seems to be: if it's a Wikimedia project, it gets special treatment, if it's not, it doesn't. And then, I've seen, other Wikis then sometimes get removed from 'External links' as a 'fan site'.
-Matt
Fred
Links that are useless to the reader should almost never be incorporated in the "Standard way", except when they're somehow official (e.g. any company's website should be linked from its article, even if the website is less than useless). But whether an external link is "normal" or "floaty-boxed" is the question asked here. Normally Wikimedia sites are floaty-boxed, and all other sites are normal-linked. Whether the "floaty-link" is all that special isn't clear to me, but a few people seem to think it's a special treatment, anyhow.
What is the comparitive advantage of a floaty-box over a regular xlink, anyhow?
Brian
On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 8:55 PM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
How do we choose what external sites we give special preference to?
Brian
Usefulness to the reader, Editorial discretion.
Fred
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On Aug 28, 2008, at 9:47 PM, Wily D wrote:
What is the comparitive advantage of a floaty-box over a regular xlink, anyhow?
Floaty boxes, especially in the default skin for Wikipedia, are visually coded as part of the interface. We establish this on the main page, when we use them as the convention for organizing the flow of information and summary. Floaty boxes mean "this is not simply information, but navigational and organizational content." So when we move a link to a floaty box it stops just being a "Here is some other stuff related to the topic" link and starts being "Here is an extension of what we do. Here is more."
In that regard, using floaty boxes at all for external links is about situating Wikipedia in context with other projects and with other sites.
The question is, do we want that situating to be on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation, or on behalf of free culture? Are we just a part of the WMF's network of sites? Or are we a part of a burgeoning movement to provide free information to the world?
By deciding that our interface and our role stops at the edges of a server farm in Florida we make ourselves a walled garden. By reaching beyond that, we make ourselves leaders in the free culture movement.
-Phil
On Aug 28, 2008, at 7:29 PM, Matthew Brown wrote:
On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 4:19 PM, Luna lunasantin@gmail.com wrote:
The description provided strikes me as more than a tad sensationalist. I've yet to see any serious proposal to stop linking to these other projects, only a number of people wondering why we're not using the standard external link style to do so.
Why don't we use the standard external link style to link to other WMF projects, then?
I wonder this very much.
Memory Alpha is a better site with higher quality control than Wikiquote, much of Wikibooks, and the bulk of Wikiversity.
Why not treat a site like it as the fantastic free resource that it is?
-Phil
On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 12:17 AM, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Aug 28, 2008, at 7:29 PM, Matthew Brown wrote:
On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 4:19 PM, Luna lunasantin@gmail.com wrote:
The description provided strikes me as more than a tad sensationalist. I've yet to see any serious proposal to stop linking to these other projects, only a number of people wondering why we're not using the standard external link style to do so.
Why don't we use the standard external link style to link to other WMF projects, then?
I wonder this very much.
Memory Alpha is a better site with higher quality control than Wikiquote, much of Wikibooks, and the bulk of Wikiversity.
Why not treat a site like it as the fantastic free resource that it is?
-Phil
Wikiquote, Wikisource, et al. are all, at least nominally, part of the same project. Indeed, we occasionally direct link words to Wiktionary that not all readers should be expected to know. (For instance, I'm writing a biography of Peter Jones these days, and linked proselytizing to Wiktionary as a three dollar word I wouldn't expect all readers to know). At the end of the day, who'd put up with a comparable link to dictionary.com?
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 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.
Brian
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?
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.
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
Good luck pushing this through on-wiki. Awhile back, I saw a bunch of soft redirects up for deletion -- the articles had already been deleted, and someone had gone through and made soft redirects to the Wikia versions of the same content (fan material). As far as I know, the redirects were all deleted.
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?
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.
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
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
That might have come across too harshly -- maybe it'll be easy to get done -- I'm just saying, be ready for a challenge.
On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 3:24 PM, Ben Yates ben.louis.yates@gmail.com wrote:
Good luck pushing this through on-wiki. Awhile back, I saw a bunch of soft redirects up for deletion -- the articles had already been deleted, and someone had gone through and made soft redirects to the Wikia versions of the same content (fan material). As far as I know, the redirects were all deleted.
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?
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.
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
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
-- Ben Yates Wikipedia blog - http://enotes.com/blogs/wikipedia
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
On Aug 29, 2008, at 4:23 PM, Wily D wrote:
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.
Well, and I figured that when I first made FCM, which is why I made it a different color from the sister project boxes. Using the same semiotics, but clearly different at the same time.
I'm open to other ways of distinguishing the two, but the basic functionality - interfacing ourselves with other free content projects - still seems to me valuable.
-Phil