[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia and Free Culture at Large

[Wily D]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 1:45 PM, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Aug 29, 2008, at 7:47 AM, Wily D wrote:
>>
>> Wikiquote, Wikisource, et al. are all, at least nominally, part of the
>> same project.
>
> Are they? I mean, is that true from a community perspective, or a WMF
> perspective?

Both, I think.  I'm the same User:WilyD on English Wikipedia,
Wikisource, Wikiquote, Commons, and this carries around a bit.  I
don't think that my using the same name elsewhere is relevant, whether
it's uncyclopedia or espn.com.  Those are "different" mes, somehow.
(Me doesn't pluralise well.)

>> Freeness is a wonderful attribute, but the honest truth is that it's
>> of virtually zero value to our readers.  By and large, they care about
>> gratis, but not libre.  Do we try to impose our ideology that way?
>> Are external links for editors, rather than readers, who necessarily
>> care more about freeness?
>
> If we're going for a readerly argument, fine - do away with our cruft
> and notability guidelines. As it's also clear that we have readers who
> want coverage of things we're hesitant to provide.

I don't think I have the power to do this.  But if we can't hope to
write a good, neutral article about something, we probably shouldn't.
There's some value in notability guidelines, and cruft guidelines in
the "keep things readable" regime.  That it's overextended is neither
here nor there.

>> If it's just internal navigation/external navigation, then it's just
>> internal projects and external projects.  If there's a different
>> scheme, there should be a clear reason why a reader cares about free
>> vs. unfree.
>
> Again, though, internal to what? I would suggest that on [[Han Solo]]
> there is more overlap between the editors and readers of it and the
> Wookiepedia page on Han Solo than there is between the editors and
> readers of it and the Wikiquote page.
>
> And yet one gets a colored box, and the other doesn't.
>
> -Phil
>
As it stands now, this is definitely the case, though.  Other
wikimedia projects are internal partners.  Picking external partners
is fraught with problems.

We probably stand to get ourselves and the foundation in trouble if we
treat Wikia as someone internal to WMF (or vice versa).  If there's a
missing functionality, the correct answer is probably "Propose a new
project".  Wikicompendium, or something.

Brian