[Foundation-l] When is a Wikipedia not a Wikipedia ?

[Marco Chiesa]

Gerard Meijssen ha scritto:
> When you go from one Wikipedia <http://wikipedia.org/> to the next, you
> always expect an encyclopaedia. You expect things to be largely the same but
> in a different language. According to Bugzilla bug
> 13578<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13578>,
> this is something that will change. The Alemannic community have found that
> having a Wikipedia, a Wikibooks, a Wiktionary and a Wikiquote is more then
> they can chew off.
>
> What the Alemannic community has decided is to fold all the projects into
> their Wikipedia and have separate name spaces for the content of their old
> projects.  Their communities seem to have
> decided<http://draft.blogger.com/:als:Wikipedia:Treffen_der_Wikipedianer/Sommertreffen_2007/Protokoll#Andri_alemannischi_Proj.C3.A4kt>on
> this, they want their name spaces now or they will move all their
> content
> into the Wikipedia name space.
>
> What I wonder is if this is something that the wider community is aware off
> and, if this is considered to be acceptable. When such major changes are
> going to happen, it makes sense to include the change to the more
> appropriate gsw language tag.
>   
First of all I think one should analyze pros and cons.
Pros:
*Recentchanges can be followed in one page rather than on a number of 
pages - this helps managing vandalisms and all the sysop work
*A lot of policies (e.g. no copyvios, no disruptive behaviour) are 
basically always the same - no duplication of effort
*It should be easier to figure out what belongs to whom.
Cons:
*Different from any other language - some dev work is needed for integration
*What is called Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia

There could be a few possibilities to overcome the cons:
*the big container should be called wikicontainer (or something with a 
more catchy name)
*it would be good if the URL als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title returned the 
encyclopedic article, and the URL als.wikinews.org/wiki/Title returned 
the news article; it may be hard to get the correct logo but otherwise 
the redirects shouldn't be too hard to set.
*it would be nice if interwikis worked in the usual way, particularly if 
in the wikipedia namespace [[de:Title]] pointed to 
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title and in the wikinews namespace it pointed to 
de.wikinews.org/wiki/Title

Cruccone