2007/1/6, Anthere Anthere9@yahoo.com:
Teun Spaans wrote:
- The people considered fanpedia as one of the most promising ideas,
as it would solve several problems at once. First, wikipedia is known and rightly mocked for its endless series of articles on Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, We Just produced Our First Albums bands, and the favourite soap-of-the-day. The wikis could still have articles on the major ones, but all articles of the bandmembers, the actors in the soap, the separate articles of TLotR characters could all be moved to fanpedia. It would raise the prestige of wikipedia. Second, most of the images which get routinely uploaded and removed are fanstuff. The english wiki is rightly trying to get rid of them, and on the Dutch wiki they are always listed as a copyvio (though we do have a backlog of stuff from before 1-9-2005). But there is a desparate need among the others to illustrate their articles, something which currnetly simply can not be done. A fanpedia could solve both problems. You did not comment on this idea, could you please let us know what you think of it?
- Much of what we have is fancruft, and it seems fairly popular. Move
all fanstuff to a separate project, outside wikipedia. Call if fanpedia or something. Let this project be more liberal in its acceptance of media, and let this project accept advertisements. This could probably support all wiki projects.
So... what you suggest is that the Foundation set up a website, primarily constituted of fan-oriented information, with mostly copyrighted images under fair-use doctrine, and put advertisement on this web site, and use the income generated by this mean to support other projects ?
Errrrr. What do other think of that idea ???
Ant
Some minor changes: 1) 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