[Foundation-l] Transwiki wars, precedence, and the fate of user-compiled lists

[Robert Scott Horning]

Brian wrote:

> Short version: There is a huge battle going on in which VFDers on WP, 
> WS, and Commons are pushing user-compiled lists from one project to 
> another. In each case, they are saying the lists belong on one of the 
> other 3 projects. Almost nobody is saying that these lists don't 
> belong anywhere, but nobody can decide on where they belong. It also 
> doesn't help that nobody on one project accepts the outcome of another 
> project's VFD (an outcome which may have said to transwiki to this 
> project) as a reason to keep it on this project.

*snip*

> Meanwhile, on Wikipedia, an Undelete request was instituted (by 
> myself, I think) for the General Slocum list, but the majority are 
> saying that it doesn't belong on Wikipedia, but on Commons or Wikisource.
>
> Summary: As Stevertigo said:  "Theres no sense in people batting this 
> thing about. Clearly it belongs at source or [WP]... There needs to be 
> some policy against batting things around."

As a regular at Wikibooks, we've battled with this issue a little bit 
ourselves in regards to lists, but it has been mainly to push them back 
to Wikipedia.  There has been some problems with Wikipedia articles 
coming to Wikibooks as a fork (I've already thrown my $0.02 on that 
issue) and in some cases throwing the articles back to Wikipedia. 
 Sometimes a book module gets started that really should be a Wikipedia 
article, and that does get transwikied.

In general the distinctions between each of the projects is not as 
clearly defined as it should be, particularly in the case of new ideas 
for content and where it should be placed.  Wikibooks in particular 
seems to be a dumping ground from Meta when nobody can think of a place 
to put a project idea (and the idea originator doesn't want to go to 
Wikicities).  Projects like Wikijunior only add to this mess (not that 
I'm opposed to Wikijunior being a part of Wikibooks at the moment). 
 Wikipedia is getting so large now (and this is a good thing) that it is 
attracting a number of people with some very original ideas (like the 
lists) which don't seem to fit current structures.

The question I have is how do you resolve these kind of issues between 
Wikimedia projects?  Embassies might be an option, but those were mainly 
designed around the idea of acting between languages where content 
disputes are much more easily dealt with.  Should the scope of them be 
broadened?  How do you keep Wikipedia from overwhelming the much smaller 
sister projects in these conflict resolutions?  I don't think every 
issue like this should be put on Foundation-l for resolution. (but 
thanks for bringing up the discussion, Brian)

-- 
Robert Scott Horning