[Wikipedia-l] Fork within a language

[Lars Aronsson]

I'm trying to understand where the boundaries for Wikipedia are.
Forgive me if this gets philosophical, and not very practical.

There has been a lot of talk about languages that fork away from the
Wikipedia project.  But what about forks within the language?  Will
the English Wikipedia always be the single source, or when will it be
reasonable to set up another Wiki?

There are, of course, already other Wikis.  http://c2.com/ (the
original Wiki, founded in 1994) has the Portland Pattern Repository,
devoted to object-oriented software development and eXtreme
Programming.  Some of the information there might overlap with
Wikipedia, but most of it would be considered too non-encyclopedic if
it was suddenly copied to Wikipedia.

Could a Wiki devoted to history have a place outside of Wikipedia?
When describing London, it would focus on the city's historic
features, not on the facets of today's London.  Then again,
Wikipedia's entries on many things are focused on history.  It is
almost as if Wikipedia is that history Wiki.  History, after all, is
so much more in line with the contents of an encyclopedia than is
object-oriented software development.

Could a leftist-point-of-view Wiki exist side by side with Wikipedia?
It would carefully point out any misuse of power, and list activist
and political groups.  Its logotype could be a hammer-and-sickle or
simply a red star on white background.  (There is already a leftist
encyclopedia (non-Wiki) in Danish on http://www.leksikon.org/)

A youth culture Wiki might list all the hot dance clubs in London, but
forget the British Museum.  (Does Wikipedia list any clubs at all?)
The entire Wiki could be white text on black background.

I think target groups, focus, design, logotypes would be different
for each one of these Wikis.  Just like websites are different today.
Some titles (like "London") would exist in several of them, but with a
different slant.  Some titles (like "British Museum") might only exist
in Wikipedia.

If all of these Wikis existed side by side, how would Wikipedia best
take advantage of this expanded network?  Should Wikipedia be its
backbone, or try to be self-sufficient, ignoring the outside world?

Just to be clear: I'm not suggesting a fork of Wikipedia.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik
  Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Linuxköping, Sweden
  tel +46-70-7891609
  http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/