[Wikipedia-l] mail WikiSpecies

Tue Sep 14 19:44:43 UTC 2004

--- Gerard MeMeijssengegerardmymyrealboxom> wrote:
> Yes, you opposed it. The wiwikimediaoard approved it; all votes were in 
> fafavourThere was discussion, the arguments were weighed. What is your 
> problem ?

Check the record, I am most certainly not the only person who opposed it on the
mailing list. Several people also emailed me and left messages on my talk page
indicating they agreed with me as well. And why the hell can the board create a
new project when there is no consensus to do so in the community? Whenever
there is no consensus we should have a vote; in this case a Wikimedia-wide one.
Top-down paternal decision making needs to *only* be for non-controversial
issues. This is so un-wiki that I'm at a loss for words. 

I'm *especially* perplexed by the *one* example given by Jimbo of the type of
entry that Wikispecies would have given that *all* that info should be in
Wikipedia. He did not even try to refute what I wrote and others backed me up
on that point. 

I think that I presented a very good case against having a separate project for
this and that this type of functionality it needed in other areas (such as
Chemistry). 

Balkanization and forking like this is very dangerous; now people will want to
have separate Wikihistory, Wikichemistry, Wikiphysics and whatnot. 

What we *need* is a far more general approach that does not equal any type of
fork. Thus my suggestion of starting this on WiWikimediaommons and
concentrating  on language independent data that could be called upon and used
by any WiWikimediaroject. 

But all the didiscussion we had on this topic was for naught; the board went
ahead and had a secret meeting about this and decided this issue when there was
a lot of opposition to it. That is *not* the way we should be doing things and
I'm flabbergasted that the board would act in this way. 

> WiWikispeciess not a fork. It is not intended as a fork, it will prove 
> not to be a fork.. Encyclopedic information is in the Wikipedias
> Wikispecies will refer to the other projects as much as the other 
> projects may refer to WiWikispecies

It is a fork of the Commons and the tree of life WikiProject. Most importantly
it is the first project (other than the embarrassing failure of the 9/11 wiki
that is *not* general (while not limited by space or the amount of detail they
can present, Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wiktionary and Wikiquote all cover a great
variety of different topic areas; Wikispecies covers a sub-topic area of a
branch of science). 

Further, its existence will only encourage more balkanization (Wiki{insert
category here}). 

-- Daniel

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