--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" jwales@wikia.com wrote:
- Have it in both places and thus have to maintain it in both places
This is clearly a point against WikiSpecies, but I don't find it a very compelling point. The kind of scientific information in WikiSpecies does not change that rapidly for most species, and in any event, it will be very simple for contributors to copy from one resource to the other...
That is a fork! You have stated several times that you would not support internal forks of Wikimedia projects. Why in the world are you moving from that position? Forks divide the userbase between two different projects, meaning that updates to one will have to be propagated to the other. But this will not always happen and if it does it takes time - time that could have been spent improving more content.
It is important to understand that we don't control the question of whether or not WikiSpecies will exist. It will. We can either do it in-house, in which case the task of updating from one to the other can be greatly simplified by software and common culture (i.e. Wikispecies contributors will be Wikimedians, we will all know each other, we can find common solutions).
What kind of logic is that? What we need to do is improve our software and use the Wikimedia Commons so that the functions that the Wikispecies people want to do can be done *without* creating a fork.
We have testimony from biologists who are eager to work on the project that they would find it useful. Presumably, they understand that a general purpose encyclopedia will cover much of the same ground and more besides. It's just a different _kind_ of work, with a different _purpose_ and a different _audience_.
What? The content will be the same and Wikipedia's audience is already everybody. There is no justification for a fork. None.
Is wiktionary a fork because the content in wiktionary could be incorporated into wikipedia? I don't see how. It's a different sort of work, and it is valuable *even if* we could legitimately have a full encyclopedia article about every word in every language, including such information as etymology, pronunciations, etc.
See my other email about how that is a total and irrelevant strawman. It also directly contradicts something you just said a few posts ago: that Wikipedia wants to have articles on every single species (something I agree with - although many will be combined into genus articles).
-- mav
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