On 11/16/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@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.