[Foundation-l] A dangerous precedent

[Daniel Arnold]

Am Freitag, 28. Dezember 2007 16:42:20 schrieb Luiz Augusto:
> [...]
> Look the timestamp... I really love the worry that de.wikipedia (and
> de.projects in general) have to quality. It is great to have. But on de
> projects. Please avoid [[Cultural dissonance]]. Your community thinks
> something, others communities not necessarily share it.

Well I can "reveal" even more. I noticed this whole matter in a personal 
meeting of Wikipedians from Nuremberg in Ansbach on 21. December 
(http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Nürnberg/Berichte#21._Dezember_2007).

Among other topics we which interwikis are an advantage to our multilingual 
readers (look at the article [[Sun]] it is a challenge to find the interwikis 
in the languages you are interested in).

Thus we naturally discussed about Volapük Wikipedias "articles" and their 
resulting interwikis and our past efforts to solve he issue *together* with 
vo.wikipedians. One of our finding was that vo.wikipedians even consider 
masses of articles *without a single sentence* as articles and properly 
proposing some of those articles for deletion as vandalism (just today Smeira 
said in one case a little sorry combined with a further demand to follow some 
strange rules).

On independence of Wikipedia communities:
* A Wikipedia that generates interwikis to such contentless articles en masse 
destroys one of our common strengths: Our cool interwiki system.
* Furthermore they challenge the reputation of the whole international 
Wikipedia community to outsiders.
* And above all. There are some unchangeable rules in every Wikipedia imposed 
by the Wikimedia Foundation. One of them is NPOV and vo.wikipedia in its 
current stage simply has no chance to get somewhere near NPOV because of 
their methods choosen.

So we all Wikipedias have mutal responsibility. If a Wikipedia is denies any 
responsibility for others and ignores (even temporarily) some unchangeable 
rules this community has to face the fact that they loose their independence 
until they are on common ground again.

I would never impose de.wikipedia's "rules" on others (heck even I do not 
agree with some of these "rules", see 
http://arnomane.wordpress.com/2007/10/04/relevanz-ist-irrelevant/), just the 
common ground with a differentiated request (keeping all non-minor articles 
of Volapük and moving it to the Incubator).

Arnomane
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