--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)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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