2007/2/26, Berto 'd Sera <albertoserra(a)ukr.net>et>:
Now this is an interesting subject. AFAIK, pillars ARE mandatory for all
editions.
The "Five pillars" page was first created in May 2005. [1] The core
principles certainly existed prior to that page. I think the four "basic
principles" of svwiki - that four point version, just missing out the
"Ignore all rules" from the enwiki Pillars - was actually once taken from
the enwiki general page on policy and guidelines, listed as the "key
policies". The enwiki page now contains six points,[2] but somehow enwiki
managed with the shorter list of four for quite some time... I guess other
wikis might do that to.
An interesting thing about translating these pages from English Wikipedia is
that they do change from time to time. If one is unlucky one might pick a
version for translation that does actually not have much support in the
enwiki community and thus soon gets changed. (Been there, done that.) I
guess there is more than one non-enwiki-community where the policies and
guidelines are much more static, since they are seen as something from
"above" and not something you tamper with yourself. IMHO that is a bad
thing.
If not just let me know, pms.wiki will be extremely
happy in
getting rid of the "no original research" limit.
If 1) NPOV, 2) the nature of encyclopaedia, and 3) free content (GFDL) are
the only things that needs to be followed on each wikipedia - as a then
board member suggested to me in June 2005 - then "no original research"
follows as a consequence of the first two ones. Most policies and guidelines
are just elaborations of specific cases, and not every Wikipedia should have
to form those in the same way. Since enwiki forms their own the way it suits
them... it means enwiki would be deciding on policies and guidelines on all
the projects. That situation would quickly become pretty weird, IMHO. They
have so many guidelines pages, so specific, on so many things...
/habj
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Five_pillars&oldid=…
[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines