On Tue, 6 Apr 2004, Timwi wrote:
Imran Ghory wrote:
I'd like to propose that we break Wikipedia's Reference Desk (and wikibook's Study help desk) to they're own wiki, at the moment both are fairly unstructured.
They seem to me to be very specific things; I think a whole new Wiki would be overkill. Instead, you can implement your proposed structed as subpages. Whatever you can do on a separate Wiki, you can do in subpages under [[Wikipedia:Reference desk]].
Firstly "Wikipedia:" pages aren't supposed to be content pages and secondly the decision was made a while back not to use subpages for content pages (see [[Wikipedia:Subpages]]).
As for overkill, I think not, such a site could easily grow to hundreds or thousands of questions today, for example see Google Answers, BrainFuse, Ask-It-Here, etc. In the past such sites (most notably WHQuestion and to a lesser extent KnowPost) have run out of funding and their entire archives of tens of thousands of questions and answers have disappeared overnight, so the Wikimedia copyleft approach would seem perfect for such a site.
But it will also mean that you will have *yet* another site with *yet* another DB, *yet* another sign-in, *yet* another set of preferences, *yet* another watchlist etc.etc.
Unless you have a serious case of [[Wikipediholic]]ism I think you'll find it's not actually compulsory to join every Wikimedia project :-)
Imran