[Foundation-l] Transwiki wars, precedence, and the fate of user-compiled lists

Sun Jul 31 02:23:21 UTC 2005

First off, my credentials:

[[en:User:Brian0918]]
Administrator
11,754 edits

Short version: There is a huge battle going on in which VFDers on WP, 
WS, and Commons are pushing user-compiled lists from one project to 
another. In each case, they are saying the lists belong on one of the 
other 3 projects. Almost nobody is saying that these lists don't belong 
anywhere, but nobody can decide on where they belong. It also doesn't 
help that nobody on one project accepts the outcome of another project's 
VFD (an outcome which may have said to transwiki to this project) as a 
reason to keep it on this project.

Long version:  There has been an ongoing battle between Wikipedia, 
Wikisource, and Commons over the fate of user-compiled, well-sourced 
lists. Specifically, I'm talking about lists of victims of disasters. It 
all started with the [[List of General Slocum victims]] and [[List of  
victims of the 1913 Great Lakes storm]]. The first appears to have only 
one source, but is not a copyvio nor direct copy of an original source, 
while the second was compiled by me for Wikipedia (originally), and 
required more research than most people put into 5 featured articles...

Anyways, the first was VFDd from Wikipedia, with a few suggestions that 
it should be transwiki'd to Wikisource:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/List_of_General_Slocum_victims

These suggestions led to both myself and the creator of the first list 
to move our lists over to Wikisource. My list was subsequently VFD'd 
from Wikisource, and a VFD was also instituted for ALL such 
user-compiled lists. Both of these VFDs are still open, I think:
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Proposed_deletions#March_2005
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Scriptorium#Remove_Tables_and_Lists_from_Wikisource

At Wikisource, the opinion seems to be that these lists belong either at 
Wikipedia or Commons (yes, Commons does accept text, read the Main 
Page).  Following these suggestions, we subsequently copied these lists 
over to Commons in the event that they suddenly disappeared from 
Wikisource......

And, of course, they are now up for deletion on Commons, where the 
opinion has been less  favorable (they don't like being the "last 
choice" for things deleted from elsewhere), although many have expressed 
the opinion that these lists do in fact belong on Wikipedia.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Deletion_requests#List_of_victims_of_the_1913_Great_Lakes_storm
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Deletion_requests#List_of_General_Slocum_victims

Meanwhile, on Wikipedia, an Undelete request was instituted (by myself, 
I think) for the General Slocum list, but the majority are saying that 
it doesn't belong on Wikipedia, but on Commons or Wikisource.

Summary: As Stevertigo said:  "Theres no sense in people batting this 
thing about. Clearly it belongs at source or [WP]... There needs to be 
some policy against batting things around."