[Foundation-l] The Perl Wiki, or Perl-Wikipedia

Thu Jul 6 00:51:33 UTC 2006

On 7/6/06, Eric R. Meyers <ermeyers at adelphia.net> wrote:
> No problem.  I understand Wikimedia's interest of breadth of topics in
> Wikipedia, over depth of topics

Wikipedia has breadth and depth. The key criteria are
- verifiability
- neutral description
- encyclopedic (rather than howtos, source documents, etc.)

See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars

Projects are generally split along the lines of fundamental _types_ of
content, rather than _topics_. The one, somewhat regrettable exception
to this rule is Wikispecies, which may eventually be integrated in a
larger project dedicated to structured scientific data.

> but how do we correctly tie a
> special-interest encyclopedia, "The Free Encyclopedia of Perl," into the main
> general-purpose encyclopedia, "The Free Encyclopedia,"

Within Wikipedia, there are so-called "WikiProjects". These are
community members who organize themselves to focus on a particular
topic. See the WikiProject programming languages as an example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Programming_languages

There is a descendant WikiProject for C++, and I see no reason why
there shouldn't be one for Perl. Wikipedians also create content
portals for particular topics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal%3ABrowse

If there's enough content in the area of Perl alone, there could be a
Perl portal. There is already a category with everything related to
Perl in Wikipedia here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Perl

Finally, if you want to work in multiple projects, we have special
boxes (so-called templates) which we can add to articles in order to
cross-reference resources in other Wikimedia projects:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ASister_projects

Using these boxes, you could reference a related Wikibook. The
Literate Programs wiki is not currently a Wikimedia project (though I
think it would be an excellent candidate to become one), but there
would be no problem with referencing http://en.literateprograms.org/
in the right places.

Please disseminate this information to the other people you've
corresponded with about this idea. ;-)

Best,

Erik