[WikiEN-l] Rethinking Fictional Topics

Thu Nov 16 23:33:47 UTC 2006

On 11/16/06, Phil Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/16/06, Kirill Lokshin <kirill.lokshin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> I think we have a much greater conflict of interest presenting other
> Wikimedia projects than we do presenting a project that comes from an
> unrelated group that shares only a founder. Certainly I have nothing
> to gain by directing traffic to Wikia. Nobody but Jimbo does, and he's
> not come anywhere near this issue. I will admit, should Jimbo start
> plastering Wikia links all over, there's a conflict of interest. But
> Jimbo is not the author or director of Wikipedia.

I was actually referring to the fact that Wikimedia as a whole stands
to benefit from Wikia's financial success, both directly (e.g. Wikia's
sponsorship of Wikimania) and indirectly (e.g. Wikia employees working
on MediaWiki).  I think the relationship is significant enough that
directing traffict to Wikia in a different way than to other sites
could be viewed as a conflict of interest; but if people don't see
that as an issue, fair enough.

> > 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.
>
> I think this misunderstands the nature of the dispute. It is not, I
> think, people who want to contribute in-universe stuff and people who
> don't. It's a dispute between people who think that in-universe stuff
> is important to have and people who don't. I suspect that if we give a
> clear indication of where in-universe material should go, people who
> are knowledgeable about fictional universes will start to offer their
> in-universe material to fan-run projects, and their out-of-universe
> material to Wikipedia.

Or, perhaps, a dispute between people who want to contribute
in-universe stuff and people who don't want them to?  (Admittedly
omitting the role of those people who want to see in-universe material
contributed, but aren't going to do it themselves.)

I think there's good reason to believe that a significant number of
people who might be inclined to contribute to Wikipedia would refuse
to contribute to a Wikia project (see the various debates over ads on
Wikipedia, etc.).  Thus, two questions:
1. Is the primary goal here to remove in-universe content from
Wikipedia - without too much thought being given to where exactly it
ends up - or to create a well-defined off-Wikipedia place for
in-universe content, with the associated removal of such material from
Wikipedia being merely a side effect?
2. If the goal is the latter, how significant are the drawbacks of
using Wikia (as opposed to a Wikimedia project) as a place to move the
material?  (In particular, how likely is the appearance of forks over
financial issues, and how harmful would the resulting divisions in the
community of contributors be?)

-- 
Kirill Lokshin