On 11/16/06, Phil Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 11/16/06, Kirill Lokshin
<kirill.lokshin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I think that giving Wikia preferential treatment
in terms of link
placement and appearance - particularly using templates that might be
readily confused with sister project ones by the casual visitor, but
really by any means - isn't a very good idea. Despite the personal
connections, Wikia isn't really an adjunct of Wikimedia; there's no
reason to treat links there any differently than we would external
links to any other non-Wikimedia site.
To be clear, the boxes are not inherently tied to Wikia, though one
imagines that Wikia would form the majority of such links just by
virtue of its role as the main hoster of free content wikis. The
template does favor MediaWiki, but this is mostly because it was easy
for me to code that way. And, actually, I still needed help getting it
to work right. If there are resources done in other software besides
MediaWiki that we should be linking to, someone should make a box that
works for them.
This is not, to my mind, a bias towards Wikia, but towards free
content in general. I think it is perfectly reasonable for us to
provide prominant links to other free content resources - particularly
ones that cover substantially different types of material from
Wikipedia. Especially if doing so helps to alleviate a fundamental
schism within the community that we currently are suffering.
While the boxes may not be Wikia-oriented in design, their _practical_
effect will primarily be to add prominent links to Wikia. Better
access to a useful free content resource is good, of course, but we
ought to be very careful about avoiding the appearance of a conflict
of interest in how we present Wikia to readers.
(This would get much worse, incidentally, if we were actually to adopt
a policy of moving material from Wikipedia to Wikia in a forcible
manner.)
As far as alleviating the schism: while driving the contributors
interested in adding in-universe coverage of fiction off to another
site would, indeed, get rid of the dispute, I'm not sure that it would
be a particularly good solution. For one thing, we can expect that a
significant portion of the potential Wikipedia contributors on a topic
will refuse to become Wikia contributors on that topic because of the
differences between the two.
--
Kirill Lokshin