Birgitte SB wrote:
--- Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
On one hand, our project is held together by a couple of major rules, which should absolutely be followed by all projects. Hmmm, I see only a few ones
- general goal of a project should be respected,
whatever the language. 2) content should be freely usable, freely reusable and free to modify. 3) content should follow NPOV rule
And that's about it.
Although these three rules apply equally to the Wikipedias the same cannot be said of all projects. Wikisource and Wikiquote particularly do not hold a NPOV policy on material.
Oh, good point. But just because there is no need for such a policy over there.
Of course, editorial notes
are another story but they make up a very, very small part of our project. Free to modify is also not a consideration on Wikisource as we explicitly forbid it in almost all cases.
Good point again.
Also since next nothing in our
project is available under GDFL it make the "freeness" very complicated. Even public domain is not straightforward. There are things that are PD in the US bur not in England for example. I could give many more inconsistencies of international copyright.
Which is why I did not mentionned a specific license. We use several licenses for images. Wikinews is not under GFDL. What we would all agree probably is the freedom to use content.
Actually, I have a question to wikibook editors. Do Wikibooks books follow NPOV, or not at all ?
On the other hand, our project is not run in a top-down fashion. There is no reason why the Foundation should know or approve local project policies. So, generally, I see not why "this is not good" unless the policy is about the goal, or the licence or the npov.
I do not think things should be run completely from the top down. But we should have some basic guidelines similar to what you gave above actually on the wikis somewhere and translated in the correct language at the very least.
Hmmm, true. I think this is particularly missing for the intermediary projects. Wikipedia had this defined very well because Larry Sanger was taking care of it. Wikinews had it quite well defined because we requested a full study and description of the concept before its approval. This never happened for projects such as wikibooks, wikiquote, wiktionary or wikisource.
If wikiquote was proposed today, it would never be accepted for example. But these projects were one day proposed on a mailing list and ... simply started !
And who took care of defining basic *common* guidelines that all projects could inspire of when starting a new language ? No one I guess.
Now, I would say that it would be more logical that a couple of editors of each project do the description of the project and draft basic guidelines, that the Foundation could approve afterwards.
Would you be interested to create a group of people whose goals would be
- To study which languages should be covered in our
projects, or not
- To study the wiseness to open a new language of a
given project (according to number of interested editors etc...)
- To gather a collection of pages of rules and
guidelines to mandatorily translate in the future language before any creation of the new wiki
- To collect pages to suggest new wikis to help them
find their way in the jungle (with recommandations such as "register to foundation-l", "follow requests for permission on meta" etc...)
Do you think that would be interesting ? If so, would you agree to lead the creation of that group ?
Ant
I think that is very interesting and would definately want to be involved. I do not know that I have enough conacts amoung people with different language skills to start it up myself. If such group of people can be rounded up I would definately want to see this through. One the first things I feel is needed is updated stats on the current wikis so we can see what worked in the past and what has stalled. Also if the stats page gave numbers of admins and buerucrats (if any) that might be useful.
We always fall on the same issue Birgitte... many would think it great, but few would agree to lead such a project. At best follow another person doing it.
Okay, so... who is motivated to start such a project ? * which entirely new languages should be accepted or opposed (including constructed languages, dialects...) * when a new language should be allowed to start in a given project * making guidelines for those starting a new language * support to new languages starting (checkuser, sysop etc...)
etc...
who is motivated to start such a project ?
Ant
BirgitteSB
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