[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia and Free Culture at Large

[Fred Bauder]

Yes, let's lighten up a bit. Wikitravel never seemed a problem, why not
others?

Fred

> 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
>
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