[WikiEN-l] Fiction and Wikia

[Laurence Parry]

> > A set of templates with a different look-and-feel
> > and perhaps an appropriate disclaimer, on the other hand,
> > might be better. We often already have plain old external links
> > anyway, though, so I'm not sure it's needed.
>
> I think there's an important line to be drawn between an external
> link and those boxes, though. The external link clearly demarcates
> its contents as something that isn't in Wikipedia. Something like a
> Wikiquote link, on the other hand, serves as a sort of extension of
> the article.
>
> I want to treat the fan-centric links as extensions, because it's
> clear that many editors and many readers expect that material to be
> in Wikipedia. And so we shouldn't just say "Go away." Or even "Go
> somewhere else." We should say "Look, here's where we've found that
> gives you this sort of information." And we should make that easy and
> well-integrated into our overall organization and navigation, because
> there's clearly demand for it.
>
> I don't see the issue of those sites not having NPOV or V - neither
> Wikiquote nor Wikinews have similar verification standards in
> practical place to Wikipedia, for instance. I think we shouldn't link
> to articles that suck or don't add anything. That seems to me to be a
> case-by-case decision, though.

Sorry to get in on this discussion a bit late. For those who don't know me, 
I'm the founder of WikiFur.com, the furry fandom encyclopedia. I've been 
dealing with for the last year or so, and I thought I'd share what I've done 
in a particular instance.

Of late, we've had a lot of people shouting "furcruft" over at Wikipedia's 
AfD over some articles about topics that are of interest to the furry 
fandom, but which are not seen to be in the general interest by most users. 
It's often hard to defend against that kind of thing, because there's 
nothing you can really do to improve an article on a topic that people just 
don't think is worthy of recording, even if there is no doubt about the 
truth of it.

In this particular case, articles about several furry conventions were up 
for deletion. It was suggested that a central article about the general 
topic of furry conventions, with links to more information for each 
convention, would be more suitable. The trouble is, where should we point to 
for that information? WikiFur was suggested as the appropriate place for 
this information to reside (Actual words: "Best kept to the somewaht scary 
environment of the furry wiki"). But WikiFur is not Wikipedia, and allows 
both original work and unverifiable material.

What I ended up doing was having about half of the article be a general, 
referenced Wikipedia article about the topic. I then included a list of 
conventions that had very short summaries of information, with links to the 
websites, and with interwiki links to each WikiFur article. The list was 
prefaced by a note explaining that target of the links could contain 
unverified and original material. All the names of the conventions were 
redirected to this page.

You can see the result here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_convention

I think this method works. It lets people use Wikipedia to look up 
information on a topic, in the case that Wikipedia doesn't actually want to 
cover that topic but "knows" a good place to go for coverage. It ensures 
that users get to the relevant information rather than a blank page, and 
that they are given appropriate notification of it being on a different 
site. It's probably not what a regular encyclopedia would do, but then 
Wikipedia is trying to be more useful than a regular encyclopedia.

The method above is not ideal for single links, and it would be good to have 
a better way of doing those than bare interwiki links (which I have used on 
occasion, for topics covered by WikiFur which are - in my best judgment - 
definitely out of Wikipedia's "notability scope"). In cases where there is a 
short article on Wikipedia covered in more depth on Wikipedia, I have tended 
to put interwiki links into See also/External links/Further reading, but 
only when our articles actually have something relevant to add.

Going forward, it would be cool to get some kind of wiki linking via search 
to topics that don't have matches on Wikipedia (with appropriate "you're 
going off Wikipedia" warnings). This would be useful for topics which may be 
featured articles elsewhere but deleted on Wikipedia for a lack of general 
relevance or verifiability, as I doubt Wikipedia wishes to implement 
automatic wiki redirects for such things! I don't know how practical that 
is, though.

-- 
Laurence "GreenReaper" Parry
http://greenreaper.co.uk - http://wikfur.com