On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 2:20 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Firstly, when I stated that Wikipendium would be a fork of Wikipedia, I intended it to be more of a social fork than a content fork - i.e., I'm not intending to use any Wikipedia content in Wikipendium. Perhaps the purpose of Wikipendium, you might say, is to provide a valid social alternative to Wikipedia with higher social and content standards.
You'll struggle to get anywhere starting from scratch. Wikipedia is so far ahead that you won't get any readers and without readers you won't get more than a handful of writers. Citizendium started off with some Wikipedia content (although later removed most of it) and had the advantage of being founded by a known name, and it's nowhere near challenging Wikipedia and probably won't be any time soon. I've never heard anyone in the real world mention it, I hear people mention Wikipedia almost every day.
I doubt we'll struggle too much starting from scratch. Of course, there will be the same old problems of attracting support, letting people know of its existence, et cetera, but _we must not let these concerns stop us from building a better compendium and maintaining a better social environment_. As it seems that _plenty_ of people are dissatisfied with the Way Wikipedia Works (TM), I don't think that it will be too much of a difficulty to convince many people to join up.
- simplicity and clarity of rules - there will be only three policies,
a "fundamental policy" (basically a constitution), a "content policy" (essential content standards such as neutrality and verifiability), and a "community policy" (essential community standards such as respect and pleasantness);
A noble goal, but if you're going to get to the kind of size you need to be to compete with Wikipedia you're going to end up needing more than that. What about a deletion policy? A blocking policy? Some method for arbitrating disputes? Nobody likes having pages and pages of rules and procedures, but unfortunately they are necessary if a large group of people are going to work together effectively.
No, no, no. This is where I strongly (but respectfully) disagree. Rules need to be _simple_, or their purpose is null and void. If you look at the "Rules" section in the Wikipendium proposal (http://wikipendium.blogspot.com/2008/07/vision-need-and-new-compendium-of-hu...), you'll see that the rules cover practically all situations that are likely to occur in an online community and can still fit into three policy pages - for example, content that does not comply with the "acceptability" rules will be eligible for immediate deletion, the "acceptable behaviour" policy will cover blocking, and methods for arbitrating disputes don't belong in policy (it could simply be stated in the "acceptable behaviour" policy when editors should pursue dispute resolution, and provide links to pages describing how to resolve disputes).
Cheers,
Thomas