Lgo over your points:

"a spam magnet".

There has been no spam at all since 23 November.

"not educational: outside our mission"

What's not educational about the events and consequences of the September 11th attacks?

"not a community: scope too narrow"

You're missing most of the project. It's not only about those who died or for their relatives. It's about September 11th and it's consequences, which so far include the invasion and conquest of two countries and a wide variety of other events.

"not verifiable"

Try the New York Times and the vast amount of other coverage. You'll find related articles in every major newspaper every day and are likely to do so for for some considerable time to come.

"no NPOV"

The memorials aren't supposed to be neutral, since that's not the point of a memorial. The biographies and details of events are supposed to be.

"improperly located"

Maybe. The coverage should eventually be encyclopedic so encyclopedia seems to fit fairly well but I suppose wikimedia wouldn't be too out of place.

You also appear to be under the misapprehension that it's a static project. I suggest you take a look at recent changes and notice that it's still growing, though coverage of the events isn't as great as it could be, by far.

With respect, you miss the point of the project. It's not simply a dumping ground for things the English language encyclopedia doesn't want. It is a place where the wealth of details about the events and their consequences can be covered. Those details are removed from the encyclopedia and are what prompted my own interest in the project, since I'm interested in truly comprehensive coverage.

If you've any concerns about the technical work involved in keeping it running and growing, I suggest you put them to rest. An extra project entry in scripts isn't at all hard to manage. 'foreachwikidb localhost "do whatever"' covers hundreds of databases already. So do the rest of the scripts used to maintain the sites. Add a thousand more and it's not a big deal either.

-----Original Message----- From: "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" jwales@wikia.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@wikimedia.org Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 10:08:19 -0800 Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] sep11.wikipedia.org

I support this concept, and will host it for free wherever the major participants prefer.

Erik Moeller wrote:

sep11.wikipedia.org is a spam magnet, and not really an appropriate project of its own:

• not educational: outside our mission
• not a community: scope too narrow
• not verifiable
• no NPOV
• improperly located: sep11.wikipedia.org suggests association with

Wikipedia - it even uses a Wikipedia logo

We're apparently so embarrassed by it that we hide it from most of our "Sister Projects" lists.

Well, I won't be too negative - there are some valuable memories there that deserve to be preserved, and volunteers have kept it in presentable shape.

So here's my offer:

With Board authorization, I would go over these pages, and transform them into a static website. This could be located at some URL which has yet to be decided, maybe 911memories.org or something like that. I would prefer a location that is not directly associated with Wikimedia, though it could be labeled a Wikimedia publication.

Wikipeople has been brought up as a potential assimilation project, but that strikes me as too vague, and there's no real thrust behind it, and I'm not sure Wikipeople is a good idea in the first place, so the static version seems like the best way forward for now. We would of course preserve and make available the wiki database in case we ever want to integrate it into something else.

Another option would be to host it at Jimbo's free wiki hosting service, Wikicities.com. That would disassociate it from Wikimedia while still allowing interested people to work on it.

Thoughts?

Regards,

Erik _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l