[Foundation-l] Wikiquote: to be, or not to be

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 6:44 AM, Pavlo Shevelo <pavlo.shevelo at gmail.com> wrote:
> First about proper tone of discussion:
>
> I'm pretty much surprised (I mean that) to see "we & them" attitude
> combined with things which seems like BIGbrotherhood.
> See how many words like "them", "their" etc. are used and isn't it
> (pardon me) too snobbish to talk about "inspections"?

I'm a Wikibookian, and I've been on the receiving end of the "us and
them" discussions on many occasions. The difference was that we
listened to criticisms and used them to improve our project in such a
way that suggestions about "merging wikibooks into wikipedia" are
rarely raised anymore. So don't talk about me being snobbish as if I'm
some faceless member of the Wikimedia bourgeoisie, I'm a member of a
small sister project that (if Aphaia's statistics are true) has a
lower hitcount then wikiquote does.

> Are you serious about proposing such metrics? Isn't it obvious that
> neither 100% of the text source, nor 99%, ... nor 50%, ... nor 10%
> (!!!) etc. of the source text con't be the quotation? Perhaps the
> problem is in confusing the notions "quotation" and "citation"?
> Seemingly anyone can take, for example, Oxford dictionary of
> quotations to get the idea of what quotation is.

No, I'm not seriously proposing anything. I'm asking where the
dividing line is located. We've had a number of questions in the past
about what exactly is the difference between Wikibooks and Wikisource,
or Wikibooks and Wikiversity. We've taken the time to precisely define
the criteria where a piece of content should appear on one or the
other. I'm asking if there is such a firm criteria between WS and WQ?
If there isn't yet, there definitely should be so you can put
discussions like this to rest.

> is a quotation no matter what the context was.
> There are 18 words (if I'm not mistaken). And there is great
> difference between this qoutation and any 18 words long citation from
> any text written/spoken by same author.

> By the way, talking about metrics - perhaps that 18 words might be the
> 100% of some 'source', it doesn't matter.

It does matter. Consider an example of the Gettysburg Address (I know
it's an american-centric example, sorry for that). It's a particularly
short speech which, in it's entirety is not much longer then some of
the quotes I've seen on Wikiquote. Now, is the full text of this
address the domain of WS or WQ? Both? What about other such short
speeches or press releases made by important persons that are both
complete sources and are short enough to be easily quotable.

Unless there is a clear separation between WS and WQ (or WQ and WN in
the case of recently-made quotations) there are going to be endless
discussions about project closures and mergers. Overlapping magisteria
indicates duplicated effort and division of community, things that
wikimedians have historically tried to avoid.

> Yes, it's good point (if I understood it well). There is (in WP as
> well as in WQ) group of templates to provide cross-references between
> WP and WQ but they are just workaround, no more.

If WQ is going to stay a separate project (and there clearly isn't
much support to pursue any other course of action) then it should be
pursuing ways to increase it's utility and relevance in relation to
other projects. Creating a technical method to do inter-project text
transclusions seems like it would be a major benefit to WQ. I can tell
you that WB would make good use of such quotes if they were readily
available, and I'm sure WP would also.

> Let me make the statement (sort of teasing if not provocation ;) ):
> all statements made by Winston Churchill and well known as his
> quotations contains much more "statement" than all details of his
> biography. Looking from this point WP provides just (pardon me)
> second-level service, answering the question: who was that guy, who
> made such clever statements, and, for example, what education should I
> have to be at least half as clever :)

This may be true. WB has long used the shortcoming of WP articles to
"explain and teach" material as strong justifications for our own
existence (especially back when people were still arguing that we
should be merged). Keep in mind, however, that Wikipedia has a
{{quote}} template that it can use to embed the most poignant quotes
directly in the article itself. Why go to a different website to read
a duplicate list of quotes? Wikipedia has the manpower and the will to
include all the necessary information into an article. And if all the
quotes don't fit in [[w:Winston Churchill]], then maybe they will fit
into [[w:Foreign policies of Winston Churchill]] or [[w:Political
beliefs of Winston Churchill]] or any other number of related articles
that might be created about the man's politics. If you're hedging your
bets about WQ's long term efficacy on the hope that WP stops short of
including all possible information at some point, you're not making a
smart decision. Information that WP can include, it WILL include
eventually. Don't underestimate that.

>> 4) Is a GFDL site license really appropriate if the vast majority of
>> content on WQ is not released under that license?
>
> That's complicate (as gini noted already)

How complicated? And why don't you see that as being a problem? The
harder it is to explain your copyright minefield, the more difficult
it is going to be for content contributors and content reusers. I've
been around the wiki block a few times, and if you can't explain your
copyright situation to me then maybe it needs to be rethought from the
ground up.

> If you are not in favor of closing what is the motivation (reason?) to
> talk about closing from your very first posting?

That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger. A while back people
talked about closing Wikibooks or merging it into Wikipedia, or any
other number of bad outcomes. In response, we took a long hard look at
ourselves and made a number of changes, some of which were very
painful. We split off WV to be separate project, we deleted or
relocated dozens of video game strategy guides, we reformulated
policies on naming conventions and inclusion criteria and we
reevaluated all the policies and notions that had previous defined us.
We abandoned all the lines in the sand and replaced them with firm
demarcations that explicitly state what our relationship was with the
rest of the WMF. We were able to focus more on our core mission and
spend less energy writing "macropedias" that would have overlapped
with WP in a way that wasn't mutually beneficial. I'd be surprised if
the members at WQ aren't interested in a similar renaissance.

--Andrew Whitworth