(I am going out of Belgrade for a couple of days and I would like to start this RFC, too. When I back to Belgrade (during the next week) I'll try to make proposals for mass content adding and this idea on Meta.)
In this moment we (on sr:) are talking about mass content adding in Serbian Wikipedia. The main issue are 40.000 of French municipalities and around 60.000 of municipalities from former Yugoslavia. (As well as municipalities from the rest of the world.)
Even this kind of articles will have a limited amount of information at the beginning, the amount of information can grow. For example: In this moment we have geographic and some demographic data. But, in the near future I can add some linguistic data, too (what dialect is spoken in what place; this can be very interesting because some dialectology atlases have a lot of information); as well as we can add a number of other information which are related to geography (time lines, ethnography, etc.).
BUT, some people do not see Wikipedia as revolution encyclopedia. Some people want to work on a classic encyclopedias which are divided into general and special. In general, project Wikispecies is a try to make one specialized encyclopedia.
My suggestion is to resolve this conflict on software level: Like Wikispecies, we can have (subdomains) xx.geography.wikipedia.org, xx.astronomy.wikipedia.org, and even xx.economy.wikipedia.org, xx.history.wikipedia.org etc. Such subdomains, as well as Wikispecies would become categories inside of Wikipedia as well as separate sites which would have only articles from specific field.
Also, this would make more easy possibility to print Wikipedia partially. It would be more easy to make editions like "Wikipedia: Geography", "Wikipedia: Linguistics" etc.
What do you think?
On 2/2/06, Milos Rancic millosh@mutualaid.org wrote:
BUT, some people do not see Wikipedia as revolution encyclopedia. Some people want to work on a classic encyclopedias which are divided into general and special. In general, project Wikispecies is a try to make one specialized encyclopedia.
The need for such a separation for wikibased encyclopedias has not been demonstrated.
In the past people have attempted to apply social network metrics to determine our scaling potential. However, it would appear that the work on Wikipedia is already self-segmenting (i.e. people who care to write about football are unaffected by people writing about physics) and that the only real shared resource is the article title namespace, from which we've seen few difficulties .
Milos Rancic wrote:
(I am going out of Belgrade for a couple of days and I would like to start this RFC, too. When I back to Belgrade (during the next week) I'll try to make proposals for mass content adding and this idea on Meta.)
In this moment we (on sr:) are talking about mass content adding in Serbian Wikipedia. The main issue are 40.000 of French municipalities and around 60.000 of municipalities from former Yugoslavia. (As well as municipalities from the rest of the world.)
Even this kind of articles will have a limited amount of information at the beginning, the amount of information can grow. For example: In this moment we have geographic and some demographic data. But, in the near future I can add some linguistic data, too (what dialect is spoken in what place; this can be very interesting because some dialectology atlases have a lot of information); as well as we can add a number of other information which are related to geography (time lines, ethnography, etc.).
Yes, and this information needs to be maintained on all the Wikipedias. So when new demographic data becomes available how is this new data propagated ? It makes for better information when figures like this are maintained in one place. It also makes for better attribution of the data. When data is copied from one wikipedia to the next, you cannot find where the data came from. It is therefore lost that a set of data was made available by organisations like the CBS (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek).
BUT, some people do not see Wikipedia as revolution encyclopedia. Some people want to work on a classic encyclopedias which are divided into general and special. In general, project Wikispecies is a try to make one specialized encyclopedia.
There is no point in making Wikispecies a specialized encyclopaedia. There is however a point to having a separate database with specific information like taxonomic information. When this information is maintained in one place it makes better sense because who would be interested both in the "Cactus opuntia L." and the "Opuntia opuntia J.M.Coult." but someone interested in the taxonomy itself ?
My suggestion is to resolve this conflict on software level: Like Wikispecies, we can have (subdomains) xx.geography.wikipedia.org, xx.astronomy.wikipedia.org, and even xx.economy.wikipedia.org, xx.history.wikipedia.org etc. Such subdomains, as well as Wikispecies would become categories inside of Wikipedia as well as separate sites which would have only articles from specific field.
It is indeed a good idea to resolve this conflict on a software level but there is more point to using Wikidata to maintain information and localise the information using standards like the CLDR for localisation and use WiktionaryZ for the translation of terminology.
Thanks, GerardM
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org