[WikiEN-l] Parallel Articles on topics

[Charles Matthews]

Alec Conroy wrote:
> Wikipedia is synonymous with NPOV and changing that would be confusing.
>
> But-- surely there should be somewhere in the Wikimedia family for
> people to collaborate on works, even if they aren't working to make
> NPOV, notable encyclopedia articles.   Editorials and opinions and
> reviews and fancruft and who knows what else.
>
> Why not let people work on a Scientific POV project?  Or a Judaism-POV
> project?  Or a project without any consistent POV across articles?  a
> 'high-quality-articles only' project?  A 'child-friendly' project?  Or
> even a project where editors could experiment with content types and
> writing styles we haven't yet considered.
>
> None of these could ever be a substitute for the NPOV & Wikipedia.
> But who knows how many amazing projects could grow if we had a simple
> process for building new ones.
>
>   
There is a process for starting new WMF sites (i.e. new sister 
projects). It is apparently dormant, presumably because the best ideas 
for new reference sites are already implemented. There is a point in 
there: not all sister projects are directly reference-oriented since 
Wikinews is for journalism. In fact what you are suggesting looks 
related to expanding the scope of Wikinews (to such things as are 
normally found in newspapers and magazines). There are good reasons to 
doubt the potential support, though, for people being able to write 
"just what they want". When it comes down to defining the actual scope 
and policies of a colloborative site, it is harder than it may look to 
transform "nice idea" into an operational community.

Charles