On Wednesday 25 August 2004 18:16, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
What makes you think there would not be an overlap?
Well, I should clarify what I meant by "any significant way". Obviously, there will be overlap in a sense, since articles about species are perfectly valid.
But the point I meant is that the overlap is not significant because it is the same _sort_ of overlap (or non-overlap) as we have between wikipedia and wiktionary.
Compare: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Economics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics
Jimbo, I don't consider this as a strong indication that there is much overlap between wikitionary and wikipedia. We are not talking about article _names_, but about the _content_ of the articles. If you compare the content they are not even close to being similar. A small correction in the Wikipedia article about "economics" would in 99% of the cases not lead to a need to correct the corresponding article in wiktionary and vice versa.
For other articles this is even more obvious, e.g.,
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Building http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building
which is just one example from about 10 articles I compared.
Consider: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger
This is a perfectly normal and typical species article. It's pretty good if you ask me.
But notice that it links to [[Siegfried & Roy]], and discussed Rudyard Kipling and William Blake's perspective on the tiger. Calvin and Hobbes is discussed, as is Tigger, Winne-the-Pooh's friend.
Agreed, but as Pete already pointed out these are just "those ultra-well-known animals". This is nothing against the ten-thousands of articles we talk about and which we need to keep in sync in case of a partial-fork.
IMHO a closer comparison than a sister-project is another language, like "en" and "de". But this time the difference is that we risk to lose a lot or even all experts of the field to a more specialized project. I don't see who then will sync these articles with Wikipedias. And I don't see why we should duplicate effort before we are sure that there is no way around it. I would much prefer a technical solution, where our user base is not forked.
The only argument I consider valid so far in favour of wikispecies is that a spezialized project could attract more experts from the field in a shorter time frame. This is probably true for every subproject, like physics, mathematics and so on. And I already can see that wikispecies will eventually divide into more subprojects using the same arguments. I really am not sure if such a fragmentation is a good thing.
best regards, Marco