[WikiEN-l] [Foundation-l] Follow up: Fan History joining the WMF family

[stevertigo]

Ryan Lomonaco <wiki.ral315 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't see how that would be an issue.  Notability is not a foundation
> policy, it's a community guideline that was enacted by editors of the
> English Wikipedia.  Other projects within the WMF family would not
> necessarily be subject to the same standards, in the same way that the
> Spanish Wikipedia does not allow fair use images while the English Wikipedia
> does.

This is an excellent point that gets to the heart of the divergence
problems between Wikipedia's and Wikimedia's respective purposes. The
difference though is that Wikimedia serves Wikipedia - not the other
way around. Wikipedia's success itself came largely from being able to
confine its scope and its mission toward dealing with issues of
substance and not so much ideas about fluff - popular as that fluff
may be.

But I agree that Wikimedia is not so encumbered with principles as
Wikipedia, and thus it can take on projects that deal with
non-encyclopedic content. (In fact this unencumberance allows for some
degree of allowance for non-encyclopedic content on even Wikipedia -
see Commons for example). You have to understand the objection here
though - which is that we inevitably find that Wikipedia will conflict
with any other Wikimedia projects if their priorities are too
different.

Wikipedia is more than just Wikimedia's flagship project, and its
encyclopedic and journalistic principles have a priority that far
exceeds its own "wiki."

-Stevertigo