[WikiEN-l] Rethinking Fictional Topics

[Kirill Lokshin]

On 11/16/06, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> There is clear demand for good in-universe guides for many fictional
> worlds, hence the large numbers of people trying to use Wikipedia for
> them. Thus we need to do more than just declare it forbidden - we
> need to create a viable alternative. Thankfully, Wikia and other
> projects have already made this possible.

If this material is of value, wouldn't it be more sensible to create a
WMF project for it?  Outsourcing it to external sites seems like a
rather roundabout way of keeping it around.

> In order to make this easier for Wikipedia, I've created this: http://
> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:FreeContentMeta
>
> This is a meta-template that can be used to generate boxes that look
> like the existing sister-project boxes for other free-content sites
> running MediaWiki. So far I've created one: [[Template:Babylon
> Project]], which is only in place on [[David Sheridan]] at present. I
> intend to put it in place on some more Babylon 5 related articles
> over the next day or two, and then to start creating templates for
> other areas and taking them to the relevant WikiProjects so they can
> get wider adoption.
>
> Since most of Wikia is GFDL, we can readily transclude our in-
> universe articles over there, and replace them with out-of-universe
> articles that contain boxes linking.

I think that giving Wikia preferential treatment in terms of link
placement and appearance - particularly using templates that might be
readily confused with sister project ones by the casual visitor, but
really by any means - isn't a very good idea.  Despite the personal
connections, Wikia isn't really an adjunct of Wikimedia; there's no
reason to treat links there any differently than we would external
links to any other non-Wikimedia site.

-- 
Kirill Lokshin