Brian wrote:
Short version: There is a huge battle going on in
which VFDers on WP,
WS, and Commons are pushing user-compiled lists from one project to
another. In each case, they are saying the lists belong on one of the
other 3 projects. Almost nobody is saying that these lists don't
belong anywhere, but nobody can decide on where they belong. It also
doesn't help that nobody on one project accepts the outcome of another
project's VFD (an outcome which may have said to transwiki to this
project) as a reason to keep it on this project.
*snip*
Meanwhile, on Wikipedia, an Undelete request was
instituted (by
myself, I think) for the General Slocum list, but the majority are
saying that it doesn't belong on Wikipedia, but on Commons or Wikisource.
Summary: As Stevertigo said: "Theres no sense in people batting this
thing about. Clearly it belongs at source or [WP]... There needs to be
some policy against batting things around."
As a regular at Wikibooks, we've battled with this issue a little bit
ourselves in regards to lists, but it has been mainly to push them back
to Wikipedia. There has been some problems with Wikipedia articles
coming to Wikibooks as a fork (I've already thrown my $0.02 on that
issue) and in some cases throwing the articles back to Wikipedia.
Sometimes a book module gets started that really should be a Wikipedia
article, and that does get transwikied.
In general the distinctions between each of the projects is not as
clearly defined as it should be, particularly in the case of new ideas
for content and where it should be placed. Wikibooks in particular
seems to be a dumping ground from Meta when nobody can think of a place
to put a project idea (and the idea originator doesn't want to go to
Wikicities). Projects like Wikijunior only add to this mess (not that
I'm opposed to Wikijunior being a part of Wikibooks at the moment).
Wikipedia is getting so large now (and this is a good thing) that it is
attracting a number of people with some very original ideas (like the
lists) which don't seem to fit current structures.
The question I have is how do you resolve these kind of issues between
Wikimedia projects? Embassies might be an option, but those were mainly
designed around the idea of acting between languages where content
disputes are much more easily dealt with. Should the scope of them be
broadened? How do you keep Wikipedia from overwhelming the much smaller
sister projects in these conflict resolutions? I don't think every
issue like this should be put on Foundation-l for resolution. (but
thanks for bringing up the discussion, Brian)
--
Robert Scott Horning