On 11/16/06, Phil Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/16/06, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
While the boxes may not be Wikia-oriented in design, their _practical_ effect will primarily be to add prominent links to Wikia. Better access to a useful free content resource is good, of course, but we ought to be very careful about avoiding the appearance of a conflict of interest in how we present Wikia to readers.
I think we have a much greater conflict of interest presenting other Wikimedia projects than we do presenting a project that comes from an unrelated group that shares only a founder. Certainly I have nothing to gain by directing traffic to Wikia. Nobody but Jimbo does, and he's not come anywhere near this issue. I will admit, should Jimbo start plastering Wikia links all over, there's a conflict of interest. But Jimbo is not the author or director of Wikipedia.
I was actually referring to the fact that Wikimedia as a whole stands to benefit from Wikia's financial success, both directly (e.g. Wikia's sponsorship of Wikimania) and indirectly (e.g. Wikia employees working on MediaWiki). I think the relationship is significant enough that directing traffict to Wikia in a different way than to other sites could be viewed as a conflict of interest; but if people don't see that as an issue, fair enough.
As far as alleviating the schism: while driving the contributors interested in adding in-universe coverage of fiction off to another site would, indeed, get rid of the dispute, I'm not sure that it would be a particularly good solution. For one thing, we can expect that a significant portion of the potential Wikipedia contributors on a topic will refuse to become Wikia contributors on that topic because of the differences between the two.
I think this misunderstands the nature of the dispute. It is not, I think, people who want to contribute in-universe stuff and people who don't. It's a dispute between people who think that in-universe stuff is important to have and people who don't. I suspect that if we give a clear indication of where in-universe material should go, people who are knowledgeable about fictional universes will start to offer their in-universe material to fan-run projects, and their out-of-universe material to Wikipedia.
Or, perhaps, a dispute between people who want to contribute in-universe stuff and people who don't want them to? (Admittedly omitting the role of those people who want to see in-universe material contributed, but aren't going to do it themselves.)
I think there's good reason to believe that a significant number of people who might be inclined to contribute to Wikipedia would refuse to contribute to a Wikia project (see the various debates over ads on Wikipedia, etc.). Thus, two questions: 1. Is the primary goal here to remove in-universe content from Wikipedia - without too much thought being given to where exactly it ends up - or to create a well-defined off-Wikipedia place for in-universe content, with the associated removal of such material from Wikipedia being merely a side effect? 2. If the goal is the latter, how significant are the drawbacks of using Wikia (as opposed to a Wikimedia project) as a place to move the material? (In particular, how likely is the appearance of forks over financial issues, and how harmful would the resulting divisions in the community of contributors be?)