[WikiEN-l] Price we pay from the Deletionists: Y-Combinator looking to fund Wikipedia-like startup

[Angela]

On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 8:49 AM, Achille <achille.listserv at gmail.com> wrote:
> The Price we pay from the Deletionists:
> Paul Graham's Y-Combinator is actively looking to fund Wikipedia-like
> startup that does away with them.
>
> See: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html (Ideas we are looking to sponsor)
>
>> 23. More open alternatives to Wikipedia. Deletionists rule Wikipedia. Ironically, they're constrained by print-era thinking. What harm does it do if an online reference has a long tail of articles that are only interesting to a few people, so long as everyone can still find whatever they're looking for? There is room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica.
>
> On that note, why don't we enable access to deleted content ? It's
> already there, we can just dump them nightly into a big file.

We've been experimenting with this idea at Wikia with a tool called
WikiRecycle. The aim is to provide an archive of content that people
can import to their own wikis. A bot grabs the content and author list
for pages on AfD or PROD. By avoiding speedy and copyvio deletions,
there's a better chance the content archived there is only
unencyclopedic and not legally problematic.

http://start-your-own.wikia.com/wiki/Hey_%28Feat._Elisha_Mama%29 is an
example. Click the history link for a list of authors. (Wikipedia
doesn't allow export of all revisions and the sorts of articles that
are likely to be deleted in the next week are most likely new and not
in the database dump, which is why we have the list of authors and not
the full page history.)

It's in beta testing right now, so any feedback is welcome.

Angela