[Foundation-l] A dangerous precedent

[Andrew Whitworth]

> I simply don't want to sit in the same boat with people that think a bot
> generated article is useful. I don't want to sit in the same boat with
> projects that don't have the patience to grow sustainable.

It's this kind of arrogance among members of the larger wikipedias
that the members of the smaller projects are most angry with. en.wp
and de.wp are using bot translated articles. Many projects are
adopting features of other projects: from templates, to translations,
to formatting, etc. en.wikibooks "stole" template designs from
en.wikipedia. en.wikiversity "stole" some formatting ideas from
it.wikipedia. The ability for one project to reuse the results of
another project is not any kind of bad thing, but is instead a way
that we should be working together on a regular basis. Using material
from one project, be it text content or templates, or infrastructure,
or whatever, is a good thing and should be encouraged. en.wikipedia
got most of it's early content by scavenging from Nupedia.

None of this is "cheating" because the method is not what's important.
The real important part is the collection and distribution of free
information. Stomping around and threatening some kind of fork or
whatever because you don't like the methods of another community to
achieve our goals is counterproductive.

--Andrew Whitworth