--- Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Wouldn't the number of articles of this type be a factor? As long as it's the only one it might as well stay where it is.
I plan to create one for every national park and national monument in the United States. I then plan to create geology articles for every U.S. state and add a lot of info to [[Geology of North America]]. This is all very appropriate for Wikipedia, IMO. The merit of each article itself, not the fact of it having many similar sister articles, is what should be looked at.
A Wikigeology project is theoretically conceivable, but nothing can happen until someone has actually conceived it and is willing to play a leading role in its development.
If there is ever such a project it must not be an encyclopedia of geology since our encyclopedia project is Wikipedia. It can contain the same information but it should package it in a way that is very different than an encyclopedia. Think of the difference between a geology textbook and a large collection of geology artices that more or less cover the same content (of course such a textbook would be hosted at Wikibooks). Each type of thing has a different purpose and each a different audience with different needs. That is the type of difference that should be the deciding factor about when to split; not the topic area.
A tabular/relational database is a different type of thing; it is not a book and its entries are not encyclopedia articles. So it is perfectly valid to create a separate project based on that platform. That is the role I would like to see Wikimedia Commons perform. But alas we already have a fork of the Commons called Wikispecies. Oh well - I lost that battle.
More people think they know about the world's animals than about its geological structure. It may be necessary to develop a Wikiatlas before a Wikigeology project.
Wikiatlas/Wikimaps is another type of project that would be fundamentally different from encyclopedia articles (although an atlas could make a good book). Hosting maps is one of the proposed functions of the Commons. In the future, GIS data could be added so that maps could be created on-the-fly.
I'm taking a class in Internet GIS applications right now and I think it would be neat to start fiddling with that sometime soon (late this semester at the earliest).
-- mav
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