--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
2) Have it in
both places and thus have to maintain it in both places
This is clearly a point against WikiSpecies, but I don't find it a
very compelling point. The kind of scientific information in
WikiSpecies does not change that rapidly for most species, and in any
event, it will be very simple for contributors to copy from one
resource to the other...
That is a fork! You have stated several times that you would not support
internal forks of Wikimedia projects. Why in the world are you moving from that
position? Forks divide the userbase between two different projects, meaning
that updates to one will have to be propagated to the other. But this will not
always happen and if it does it takes time - time that could have been spent
improving more content.
It is important to understand that we don't
control the question of
whether or not WikiSpecies will exist. It will. We can either do it
in-house, in which case the task of updating from one to the other can
be greatly simplified by software and common culture (i.e. Wikispecies
contributors will be Wikimedians, we will all know each other, we can
find common solutions).
What kind of logic is that? What we need to do is improve our software and use
the Wikimedia Commons so that the functions that the Wikispecies people want to
do can be done *without* creating a fork.
We have testimony from biologists who are eager to
work on the project
that they would find it useful. Presumably, they understand that a
general purpose encyclopedia will cover much of the same ground and
more besides. It's just a different _kind_ of work, with a different
_purpose_ and a different _audience_.
What? The content will be the same and Wikipedia's audience is already
everybody. There is no justification for a fork. None.
Is wiktionary a fork because the content in wiktionary
could be
incorporated into wikipedia? I don't see how. It's a different sort
of work, and it is valuable *even if* we could legitimately have a
full encyclopedia article about every word in every language,
including such information as etymology, pronunciations, etc.
See my other email about how that is a total and irrelevant strawman. It also
directly contradicts something you just said a few posts ago: that Wikipedia
wants to have articles on every single species (something I agree with -
although many will be combined into genus articles).
-- mav
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