Peter van Londen wrote:
Some minor changes:
- Not set-up a different website, but Fanpedia would be a wiki, sister
project of Wikipedia, Wikiquote and so on, it will also benefit from a high google-ranking as have all wikimedia projects. 2) Fair use images: I hope not; I certainly hope that we get the fair use matter solved for all wikimedia projects. 3) Advertisements on fanpedia will subsidize all other projects (there will be a lot of trafic diverted to Fanpedia, so money will flow).
The thing is that a lot of people work on the fancruft, imho non-encyclopedian, part of Wikipedia and that is OK. Prison Break is one of the most visited articles on dutch Wikipedia. Most nl-Wikipedians are uneasy with this kind of articles, which evoluate to a encyclopedia inside the wikipedia in itself, and would be happy to move them to a different project.
I think you what you are saying is that you are afraid that the sysops of this project would not be able to manage the project enough, as it will certainly be people which might have a different view on wikimedia ideals?
This proposal will certainly help solve the money-problems, with an acceptable compromise for adds on one of the Wikimedia projects.
Kind regards Londenp
This sounds very similar to Wikicities/Wikia. Do you care to elaborate how this would be any different (other than direct control by the WMF)?
Fan websites are very common, indeed could be called a "killer app" for Wikia. Note especially Memory Alpha and the Stargate Wikias that fit in particularly with what you are saying here with fansites, in addition to explicit advertising that appears. Fair use images have been decided by each Wikia community independently.
Now what the exact relationship bewteen Wikia and WMF is right now, I'm not entirely sure. Two (is it three?) former members of the WMF board of trustees are still involved with Wikia, and there was some talk once upon a time that Wikia would help sponsor the WMF through some sort of cash contributions. I havn't seen anything explicitly mentioned in fundraisers about this, however, or in any of the currently published financial reports. There are several participants on this mailing list that could certainly elaborate on this point authoritatively. I do know there is no legal relationship between Wikia and the WMF at the moment.
Quite a bit of material from Wikibooks has been transwikied to Wikia projects where, based on sentiment within the Wikibooks community, it was felt that it was most appropriate to those projects. As a general principle, I try to encourage this action only between Wikimedia projects, but there are some obvious holes in Wikimedia project coverage that keeps this from being a perfect fit with information that otherwise would be a general part of the Wikimedia charter. "Fancruft", as you have tried to suggest, certainly is one of these areas.