[Wikipedia-l] Proposed fork of Wikipedia

[Thomas Larsen]

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 2:20 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Firstly, when I stated that Wikipendium would be a fork of Wikipedia,
>> I intended it to be more of a social fork than a content fork - i.e.,
>> I'm not intending to use any Wikipedia content in Wikipendium. Perhaps
>> the purpose of Wikipendium, you might say, is to provide a valid
>> social alternative to Wikipedia with higher social and content
>> standards.
>
> You'll struggle to get anywhere starting from scratch. Wikipedia is so
> far ahead that you won't get any readers and without readers you won't
> get more than a handful of writers. Citizendium started off with some
> Wikipedia content (although later removed most of it) and had the
> advantage of being founded by a known name, and it's nowhere near
> challenging Wikipedia and probably won't be any time soon. I've never
> heard anyone in the real world mention it, I hear people mention
> Wikipedia almost every day.

I doubt we'll struggle too much starting from scratch. Of course,
there will be the same old problems of attracting support, letting
people know of its existence, et cetera, but _we must not let these
concerns stop us from building a better compendium and maintaining a
better social environment_. As it seems that _plenty_ of people are
dissatisfied with the Way Wikipedia Works (TM), I don't think that it
will be too much of a difficulty to convince many people to join up.

>> - simplicity and clarity of rules - there will be only three policies,
>> a "fundamental policy" (basically a constitution), a "content policy"
>> (essential content standards such as neutrality and verifiability),
>> and a "community policy" (essential community standards such as
>> respect and pleasantness);
>
> A noble goal, but if you're going to get to the kind of size you need
> to be to compete with Wikipedia you're going to end up needing more
> than that. What about a deletion policy? A blocking policy? Some
> method for arbitrating disputes? Nobody likes having pages and pages
> of rules and procedures, but unfortunately they are necessary if a
> large group of people are going to work together effectively.

No, no, no. This is where I strongly (but respectfully) disagree.
Rules need to be _simple_, or their purpose is null and void. If you
look at the "Rules" section in the Wikipendium proposal
(http://wikipendium.blogspot.com/2008/07/vision-need-and-new-compendium-of-human_01.html),
you'll see that the rules cover practically all situations that are
likely to occur in an online community and can still fit into three
policy pages - for example, content that does not comply with the
"acceptability" rules will be eligible for immediate deletion, the
"acceptable behaviour" policy will cover blocking, and methods for
arbitrating disputes don't belong in policy (it could simply be stated
in the "acceptable behaviour" policy when editors should pursue
dispute resolution, and provide links to pages describing how to
resolve disputes).

Cheers,

Thomas