[Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

Sun May 9 22:39:40 UTC 2010

Ting Chen <wing.philopp at gmx.de> wrote:
>> Commons, Wikiquote and Wikisource has by themselves no educational
>> value. They gain their educational value in the way that they provide
>> repositories for the other WMF projects.

Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hold on, now.  These are all awesome educational projects in their own right.
>... Commons resolved the "are we our own project or are we a technical
> solution for other projects" question early in its evolution.   And
> its great that it became its own community, because its culture has
> developed some of the best examples of multilingual collaboration we
> have.

To be fair to Ting, I think he meant what others have pointed out
before that Wikipedia is the flagship project - not just in name and
not just in numbers. This is not to denegrate any of the other
projects, but to remember that they all started in large part because
"the wiki" (en.wp) conquered the "where's the content" paradigm and it
started receiving materials that were beyond the scope of an
encyclopedia. News, sources, images, etc. Of course Sam is absolutely
right about the value that each of the once satellite projects have
gained on their own.

There are a number of reasons why it's important to remember that the
encyclopedia comes first. For one, successful companies can get too
big and lose focus: Drifting into "wiki" priorities instead of
"encyclopedia" priorities, for example, would be the albatross here.
That's not to say that we shouldn't further pursue the science of
collaborative database interfaces (ie. "wikis").

-Stevertigo