[Foundation-l] Merge wikis

[Milos Rancic]

On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 19:27, Arlen Beiler <arlenbee at gmail.com> wrote:
> Milos Rancic wrote:
>> There are two types of Wikimedia projects: those which could be
>> reasonably treated as extensions of Wikipedia and those which couldn't
>> be. For example, Wiktionary (as it is presently) and Wikibooks are
>> obvious extensions of Wikipedia: If you need shorter definitions, more
>> philological than encyclopedic, you would put that in the form of
>> dictionary. If you need to write in depth about some topic, you would
>> use the form of book.
>
> While I agree that Wiktionary looks like it would be an extension of
> Wikipedia, it would definitely need it's own namespace. I don't have any
> experience on it, so I don't know what they're opinion is. As for Wikibooks,
> it would never work. They are two different projects entirely. You can't
> write in-depth on a topic without leaving an encyclopedic form of writing
> and that would never work on Wikipedia.
>
> Wikisource isn't going to merge for obvious reasons, just in case anyone is
> still wondering. Nor is Wikiversity, since Wikipedia would go up in smoke.
> WikiQuotes hardly sounds like an encyclopedia. Wikinews is too dynamic and
> has it's own set of problems to merge easily. It could be done though if
> given it's own namespace, and Wikipedia would definitely benefit. There are
> logistical problems though that would have to be dealt with. I'm not even
> sure why there is a WikiSpecies, though I have hardly looked at it.
>
> I like the sound of "WikiCommons", it makes it sound as important as the
> others while still keeping the Common idea.

I don't think that you've understood the idea properly. Redirects +
Incubator Extension would allow to xyz.wikipedia.org to have virtually
separate project xyz.wikibooks.org. Yes, they would share the same
admins (if they want that), their "global" RecentChanges and other
technical benefits from having one project, but they would be also
separate projects, with their own dynamics. So, you could write poetry
inside of the special namespace "Poetry:" if you want and it wouldn't
interfere with encyclopedic articles.

So, as it wouldn't be a technical issue, the things about we need to
think are social. For example, it is not a technical problem to have
Wikisource as a virtual project inside of one Wikipedia, it is just
more sane to put it on Multilingual Wikisource because there are
people who know how OCR and proofreading processes should be
implemented. Similarly to that, having Wikiversity as virtual project
inside of one Wikipedia would be harmful for both small groups: in the
sense of editorial policies, Wikipedia has to follow strict rules,
Wikiversity mustn't follow strict rules; which would create confusion
inside of one small community.

Wikinews is in between based on how serious the work on news would be
done. If it is dominated by short news about current events, virtual
project inside of Wikipedia would be good enough. However, if there is
a serious group of journalists, which want to work on other
journalistic forms, like interviews are, for example, then they should
have a separate project. And, again, it is not because of technical
issues, but because of different approaches.