[Wikipedia-l] Re: What is the purpose of this mailing list ??

Wed Aug 25 17:54:21 UTC 2004

On Wednesday 25 August 2004 18:16, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

> > What makes you think there would not be an overlap?
>
> Well, I should clarify what I meant by "any significant way".
> Obviously, there will be overlap in a sense, since articles about
> species are perfectly valid.
>
> But the point I meant is that the overlap is not significant because
> it is the same _sort_ of overlap (or non-overlap) as we have between
> wikipedia and wiktionary.
>
> Compare:
> http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Economics
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics

Jimbo, I don't consider this as a strong indication that there is much overlap 
between wikitionary and wikipedia. We are not talking about article _names_, 
but about the _content_ of the articles. If you compare the content they are 
not even close to being similar. A small correction in the Wikipedia article 
about "economics" would in 99% of the cases not lead to a need to correct the 
corresponding article in wiktionary and vice versa. 

For other articles this is even more obvious, e.g.,

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Building
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building

which is just one example from about 10 articles I compared.

> Consider:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger
>
> This is a perfectly normal and typical species article.  It's pretty
> good if you ask me.
>
> But notice that it links to [[Siegfried & Roy]], and discussed Rudyard
> Kipling and William Blake's perspective on the tiger.  Calvin and
> Hobbes is discussed, as is Tigger, Winne-the-Pooh's friend.

Agreed, but as Pete already pointed out these are just "those ultra-well-known 
animals". This is nothing against the ten-thousands of articles we talk about 
and which we need to keep in sync in case of a partial-fork. 

IMHO a closer comparison than a sister-project is another language, like "en" 
and "de". But this time the difference is that we risk to lose a lot or even 
all experts of the field to a more specialized project. I don't see who then 
will sync these articles with Wikipedias. And I don't see why we should 
duplicate effort before we are sure that there is no way around it. I would 
much prefer a technical solution, where our user base is not forked.

The only argument I consider valid so far in favour of wikispecies is that a 
spezialized project could attract more experts from the field in a shorter 
time frame. This is probably true for every subproject, like physics, 
mathematics and so on. And I already can see that wikispecies will eventually 
divide into more subprojects using the same arguments. I really am not sure 
if such a fragmentation is a good thing.

best regards,
  Marco