[Foundation-l] Follow up: Fan History joining the WMF family

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
You might have waved a red rag, time to hoist the pirate flag... What
nonsense. Wikipedia is the Wikimedia Foundation's biggest project and indeed
it gets most of the attention and most of the tender loving care. HOWEVER,
there are other projects that are most definitely not encyclopaedic and that
are massively important, relevant even succesful. Not just Commons, but also
projects like Wiktionary, Wikinews...

These projects are successful despite the lack of focussed attention given
to Wikipedia. This will be partially remedied with the Commons project.
Similar projects could and should be considered for the other projects. The
best argument I have heard so far why this is not done is that the WMF lacks
the resources to do this and do this well at this time.

It has been argued in the past that projects like Wiktionary would do better
outside the WMF. This might be true, personally I am not sure.
Thanks,,
     GerardM


2009/12/1 stevertigo <stvrtg at gmail.com>

> Ryan Lomonaco <wiki.ral315 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I don't see how that would be an issue.  Notability is not a foundation
> > policy, it's a community guideline that was enacted by editors of the
> > English Wikipedia.  Other projects within the WMF family would not
> > necessarily be subject to the same standards, in the same way that the
> > Spanish Wikipedia does not allow fair use images while the English
> Wikipedia
> > does.
>
> This is an excellent point that gets to the heart of the divergence
> problems between Wikipedia's and Wikimedia's respective purposes. The
> difference though is that Wikimedia serves Wikipedia - not the other
> way around. Wikipedia's success itself came largely from being able to
> confine its scope and its mission toward dealing with issues of
> substance and not so much ideas about fluff - popular as that fluff
> may be.
>
> But I agree that Wikimedia is not so encumbered with principles as
> Wikipedia, and thus it can take on projects that deal with
> non-encyclopedic content. (In fact this unencumberance allows for some
> degree of allowance for non-encyclopedic content on even Wikipedia -
> see Commons for example). You have to understand the objection here
> though - which is that we inevitably find that Wikipedia will conflict
> with any other Wikimedia projects if their priorities are too
> different.
>
> Wikipedia is more than just Wikimedia's flagship project, and its
> encyclopedic and journalistic principles have a priority that far
> exceeds its own "wiki."
>
> -Stevertigo
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>