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