[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia and Free Culture at Large

[Philip Sandifer]

One of the positive things to come from our prominence has been the  
rise of similar subject-specific resources - many clustered around  
Wikia, but not all. For any supporter of free culture it is a deeply  
heartening thing to see a genuine focus on creating free content for a  
variety of purposes.

There are obvious benefits to finding ways to work closely with these  
projects. For one thing, it promotes free culture, and that is our  
goal. For another, these projects often fill in gaps in our coverage.  
It's a simple fact of life that our most-read articles are often ones  
on fictional subjects. And we have major controversies in this area as  
people seek to restrain our coverage due to notability. If we can  
interface ourselves with fan wikis for various shows we can also  
better police the boundary between what we want to cover and what we  
don't want to cover without leaving our readers short-changed.

In fact, this is often a major argument raised in notability  
discussions - if people want plot summaries they should go to X Wiki.

Years ago, I created http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:FreeContentMeta 
  to help with this - it was a base template that could be used to  
create sister-project like boxes for other wikis. This let us, on  
fictional characters, have a link much like we have for Wikiquote or  
Wikisource that basically said "If you want detailed in-universe  
information, here's where to go." This struck me as common sense - it  
helped with the problem of getting readers to expect us to provide  
what we actually provide, it helped editors have a better sense of  
where to put different types of information, and it helped free  
content by creating prominent and crawlable links to free content  
resources (since Wikia is on the interwiki map, and thus links are not  
nofollow).

Unfortunately, the templates are pretty near to being deprecated with  
no real replacement in mind. This strikes me as very, very unfortunate  
- the attitude, which seems to be that we ought never promote  
anything, ever, and that we have no obligation to help other free  
content resources, seems to me both a case of pulling up the ladder  
and of situating ourselves as a walled garden. We want people to go to  
other resources instead of us, but we are unwilling, it seems, even to  
tightly integrate with those resources to make that leap easy for  
readers. The idea that we have an obligation to help free culture is  
roundly and dismissively rejected, and the very idea of providing  
prominent links to free content sites is decried as an NPOV violation  
(though nobody, to date, has explained what viewpoint it unfairly  
advances...)

What can or should we do in this area? How can we best use the  
existence of a much larger galaxy of free content resources to improve  
ourselves and improve them? What role do we play in the larger free  
culture community? Are we a walled garden that is only to be imitated?  
Or are we the leaders who can and should use our prominence and our  
muscle to help create free sources of knowledge for anything that  
people want to know?

For me, this is a no-brainer. So how do we do it?

Best,
Phil