Hello, fellow Wikimedians!

Since this is my first post to this mailing list, please let me introduce myself. My name is Jonathan Fors and I am chairman for the Västerås LUG, located 100 km west of Stockholm, Sweden. I am a full-time Linux user and an occasional Wikipedia contributor, and I am a big fan of Wikis in general.

In our LUG, which has existed for little less than a year, we have started an ambitious Wiki project using Mediawiki. Its purpose is not only to collect information about, but also to be a complete Swedish Free Software documentation resource. We have and are translating HOWTOs, manpages, tips and write documentation about all files and directories of the *NIX system. Basically, it aims to be a complete guide to GNU/Linux, *BSD and Free Software.

Now, the last week, some of our contributors have told us that they feel like duplicating the Wikipedia project, something that I cannot fully agree to. Wikipedia is encyclopedic and documentation isn't, meaning that it not really fits there. I know about Wikibooks, but the whole concept of a "single place for GNU/Linux and Free Software documentation" would be a little far off. But not to cooperate with the Wikimedia foundation would be to waste a big resource of knowledge and knowledgeable people. So therefore, I have an idea.

There are, as far as I can see, a few subprojects under the Wikimedia umbrella. Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikibooks are a few examples. They contain different types of, often non-encyclopedic information that don't fall under the same category as Wikipedia. The project most similar to our Wiki is probably Wikibooks, which contains, guess what, books! Well, not only books, but manuals in general. This is although not ideal for the users that our Wiki aims to serve with information.

So here is the idea, feel free to flame or comment about it. I propose a new subproject, perhaps called "Wikidoc", that documents 1. GNU/Linux (including all distributions) 2. The various flavours of Free operating systems 3. Free software in general (including those running on Windows, web-based CM systems and so on). Information (the sort you could find in an encyclopedia) goes to Wikipedia and is linked from Wikidoc. Longer, in-depth books are linked from Wikibooks, and source code and historical Usenet announcements could be linked from wikisource. Wikimedia has IMHO a good opportunity to create a Wiki for Free software, and much of the infrastructure is already present.

Okay, I bet you have some things to crack down onto this on. First, why do this under Wikimedia when there is wiki.linuxquestions.org and the BerliOS Wiki that does the "same thing"? Well, this thing would not be able to use the Wikimedia projects very well. The great resources would effectively not be usable and also, the user base is much smaller than Wikipedia's.

What has this got to do with Wikimedia at all? In my opinion, the Free Software documentation would be something that would attract a lot of new users, in a lot of languages. The reason we started our Swedish project was that we felt that there was very little high-quality documentation for GNU/Linux written in Swedish, and the little that was was very scattered across the Internet. This was the situation for the Swedish GNU/Linux movement back then, something that now has changed with the advent of a few GNU/Linux-oriented Wikis.

I hope to receive feedback on this idea, and in the meantime you can visit the Wiki at http://vlug.linux.se/wiki (Swedish)

Yours Sincerely, Jonathan Fors Chairman, Västerås Linux User Group http://vlug.linux.se/