[Foundation-l] Merge wikis

Tue Jul 5 16:34:29 UTC 2011

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 07:02, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Or we could just leave the sister projects alone.  That is also a viable option.
>
> For the English projects, clear separation between the projects is
> necessary so that they can grow different cultures.  The sister
> projects are progressing nicely enough.
>
> It is much easier to tell a potential transcriber about the Wikisource
> project, as opposed to trying to warn them about all the policies of
> Wikipedia, most of which have no bearing on transcribing.

There are two types of Wikimedia projects: those which could be
reasonably treated as extensions of Wikipedia and those which couldn't
be. For example, Wiktionary (as it is presently) and Wikibooks are
obvious extensions of Wikipedia: If you need shorter definitions, more
philological than encyclopedic, you would put that in the form of
dictionary. If you need to write in depth about some topic, you would
use the form of book.

Wikisource and Wikiversity couldn't be treated as an extension of
Wikipedia, as they assume a type of work different from Wikipedia:
Wikisource gathers texts as they are, while Wikiversity has to
question even basic principles of Wikipedia, as it indents to be an
academic project.

Wikinews is in the middle. Creating news have different dynamics from
creating the articles, but Wikipedians are keeping news up to date,
although it is not the primary purpose of Wikipedia.

So, a small community could benefit from having Wiktionary and
Wikibooks inside of their Wikipedia. At the other side, the same
community would benefit more if it has technological and
methodological support from Multilingual Wikisource. LangCom's
proposal is on that line, but I am not sure has it been verbalized
publicly.