[Foundation-l] breaking English Wikipedia apart

[David Goodman]

To the extent that the enWP is a project to build a practical
encyclopedia, it seems to have been getting increased acceptance as it
gets larger. There is no indication that this trend is ceasing or or
even faltering.

To the extent that WP is an experiment, the experiment has already
succeeded beyond the limits of similar projects, and there is no
reason to stop at this point. Predictions that there would be a size
beyond which it no longer scales have so far all of them been wrong.
Splitting the encyclopedia is irreversible--we can always decide to
split, but it is very unlikely that after sections develop separately
they will be able to recombine.  But there  is nothing to stop anyone
from making a split if they desire while leaving the actual Wikipedia
as it is. I think WP can only benefit from serious competition.

I agree the role of the wikiprojects should be increased and perhaps
formalized, but already over  the last few years at the enWP,   some
of the various WikiProjects and less organized impromptu groups of
people interested in various aspects have made decisions that the
community has not supported.  There is an advantage in having an
Encyclopedia with uniform policies that have general agreement--people
read it as  a whole & have common expectations.

And with respect to BLPs, the biographical information about living
people permeates most areas of the Encyclopedia, not just the articles
with a living person's name as the title.


On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 7:33 PM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Was: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
> Was: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness
>
> On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> On 2/25/11 3:11 PM, John Vandenberg wrote:
>>> On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 11:18 PM,  <dex2000 at pc.dk> wrote:
>>>> ..
>>>> I think it could also be considered to divide our huge language wikis
>>>> into smaller parts. The existing WikiProjects could be made virtual wikis
>>>> with their own admins, recent changes etc. That way, each project is in
>>>> fact like a small wiki to which the newbie could sign up according to
>>>> 'hers' area of interest and where the clarrity and friendlier atmosphere
>>>> of the smaller wikis could prevail.
>>>
>>> This is the best solution, in my opinion.
>>
>> Yes, the larger wikis need to become WikiProject-centric. First step in
>> doing this would be to create a WikiProject namespace. Second step would
>> be to make WikiProject article tagging/assessment part of the software
>> instead of template-based.
>
> I can see how those would be useful steps, however I think those steps
> are part of a 10 year plan.
>
> A 10 year plan will be overrun by events.
>
> We need a much more direct plan.
>
> I recommend breaking enWP apart by finding easy chunks and moving them
> to a separate instance, and having readonly copies on the main project
> like we do for File: pages from Commons.
>
> IMO, the simplest and most useful set of articles to break apart is BLPs.
> The criteria is really simple, and those articles already have lots of
> policy differences around them.
>
> By the time we have perfected this system with the BLPs, the community
> will have come to understand the costs/benefits of moving other
> clusters of articles to separate projects, and we'll see other
> clusters of articles migrated to sub-projects.
>
> btw, this idea is not new, but maybe its time has come.
> http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=29729
>
> --
> John Vandenberg
>
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-- 
David Goodman

DGG at the enWP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG