Mark Williamson wrote:
If they're so innocent, why would they be hurt by "half-sung songs"?
Come on, Mark. Part of your description matches myself and my website susning.nu, a big non-English wiki. Some readers might believe that you are pointing at me, and conclude that the other information is some kind of truth about me. That hurts me. If you really believe what you wrote, then I'm here to clarify any misunderstandings and answer your questions. If you mean someone else, you will save me a lot of trouble by saying so.
Perhaps you mean Erik Möller and his infoAnarchy? Perhaps you mean Jimbo Wales and his Wikicities?
I'll assume the worst, and clarify your points as if they were relating to me. As far as I know, you don't speak Swedish and are not a contributor to the Swedish Wikipedia, and so it disturbs me to learn that you might have such strong and possibly damaging opinions about me. Who gave you these impressions? Should you be more careful with trusting your sources?
I was thinking of another non-English semifork of Wikipedia
Susning.nu has never been a fork (or "semifork", whatever that is) of Wikipedia. It is a big Swedish wiki that I started from scratch after Larry Sanger made it clear that what I wanted to do would fall outside of Wikipedia's strictly encyclopedic scope. Not a single text has been copied or translated from Wikipedia to Susning.nu. If that happened, it would be a copyright violation (unless the author dual licensed the text), since susning.nu does not enforce the GFDL license like Wikipedia does. In many cases, susning.nu contributors have later copied their own texts to the Swedish Wikipedia, which of course is perfectly OK.
which has way more articles than the Wikipedia version, and
This could be said a year ago, but today Susning.nu has 58,400 articles, while the Swedish Wikipedia has 80,600.
whose owner is deeply involved in Wikipedia but while
I'm not "deeply involved" in Wikipedia. I'm an occasional contributor (user:LA2), but I've never been and have never aspired to be an administrator, bureaucrat, board member or developer of Wikipedia. On the contrary, I've been extremely careful to point out the difference between the two projects, and kept myself at arm's length distance from anything Wikipedia. I've never participated in any vote or opinion poll on how to run the project.
bragging in private e-mails and on-list about how much work he/she does compared to others to put more free content online,
Back in 1992, I started Project Runeberg (runeberg.org), the Scandinavian e-text project, which possibly was the first "clone" of Project Gutenberg. In the more than 12 years since, quite a lot of out-of-copyright literature has been digitized there, including several old encyclopedias. Much of this has benefited the Swedish, Danish, and Finnish Wikipedia. No description of who I am would be complete without mentioning this. I've spent more hours on Project Runeberg than on any job or hobby I've ever had.
does not consider allowing the corresponding language version of Wikipedia to share content.
I'm contributing *some* of my texts and photos to Wikipedia, but that's not to say that everything I write or do is released for free. Especially, the texts that I wrote for susning.nu are under my copyright without open licensing. What others do with their texts on susning.nu is their decision, and the site does not force contributors to use any particular license. In practice, this makes mirroring of the entire site impossible, and that is a deliberate choice; I don't believe in website mirroring. I've also written texts and software for other purposes and customers. These texts belong to me or my customers and the copyright holders decide what or how to license them.