On 7/6/06, Eric R. Meyers ermeyers@adelphia.net wrote:
No problem. I understand Wikimedia's interest of breadth of topics in Wikipedia, over depth of topics
Wikipedia has breadth and depth. The key criteria are - verifiability - neutral description - encyclopedic (rather than howtos, source documents, etc.)
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars
Projects are generally split along the lines of fundamental _types_ of content, rather than _topics_. The one, somewhat regrettable exception to this rule is Wikispecies, which may eventually be integrated in a larger project dedicated to structured scientific data.
but how do we correctly tie a special-interest encyclopedia, "The Free Encyclopedia of Perl," into the main general-purpose encyclopedia, "The Free Encyclopedia,"
Within Wikipedia, there are so-called "WikiProjects". These are community members who organize themselves to focus on a particular topic. See the WikiProject programming languages as an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Programming_languages
There is a descendant WikiProject for C++, and I see no reason why there shouldn't be one for Perl. Wikipedians also create content portals for particular topics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal%3ABrowse
If there's enough content in the area of Perl alone, there could be a Perl portal. There is already a category with everything related to Perl in Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Perl
Finally, if you want to work in multiple projects, we have special boxes (so-called templates) which we can add to articles in order to cross-reference resources in other Wikimedia projects: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ASister_projects
Using these boxes, you could reference a related Wikibook. The Literate Programs wiki is not currently a Wikimedia project (though I think it would be an excellent candidate to become one), but there would be no problem with referencing http://en.literateprograms.org/ in the right places.
Please disseminate this information to the other people you've corresponded with about this idea. ;-)
Best,
Erik