Hi Erik,
On Wednesday 05 July 2006 18:23, Erik Moeller wrote:
Hello Eric,
as geni has explained, the Wikimedia Foundation tends to launch broad projects over narrow ones: Wikipedia over "an encyclopedia of birds", Wikinews over "a news site about health issues", Wikisource over "public domain novels", and so on.
No problem. I understand Wikimedia's interest of breadth of topics in Wikipedia, over depth of topics, but how do we correctly tie a special-interest encyclopedia, "The Free Encyclopedia of Perl," into the main general-purpose encyclopedia, "The Free Encyclopedia," and also to other possible special-interest encyclopedias. Do you know what I mean, and do now you know where I'm trying to go with this WikiMedia-based hierarchy? I don't want to copy or steal, just emulate and extend. I need to know the best hierarchical structure that will integrate the various special-interest information sources most effectively to avoid redundancy and bring about synergy with the Wikimedia components such as Wikipedia, and now Wikibooks.
Much of the content of an "encyclopedia of Perl" would likely have a place in our existing Wikipedia and Wikibooks projects. For source code, there's also an interesting wiki at: http://en.literateprograms.org/
Thanks, I'll take a look at that site.
So right now, if most of the Perl content would be in Wikibooks, then you'd apparently have no problem with some editing under the Perl topic in Wikipedia to organize and reference those Wikibooks, as long as we didn't go too far into the great depth of the topic of Perl within Wikipedia? We could possibly find "The Right Way" to incrementally cooperate, working together and agreeing which direction that we might go in the future? There will be external references to glue everything together, but as long as it gets glued together, that's okay. We can incrementally figure out "The Right Way" to do things.
I didn't want to slam Wikipedia, by doing too much of the wrong or right things, without Wikimedia having some clue as to what was happening underneath the Perl topic. Okay?
What would be the justification for starting a new separate Wikimedia site just for Perl? Mind you, nothing will stop you from setting up your own site using the MediaWiki software (except maybe an aversion to PHP ;-). You can also use a wiki hosting service, like the ones listed at: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wiki_Science:How_to_start_a_Wiki
My real interest is integrating the depth of Perl knowledge with the breadth of Wikipedia knowledge, creating Perl-Wikipedia, and "The Perl Wiki" will eventually happen. And yes, I do PHP-CGI too, and we're already aware of MediaWiki in the perl.advocacy usenet group, because I know that it's currently being used for the Australian Perl Wiki at http://perl.net.au, which I referenced in my initial submission.
Eric