Monday, April 14, 2008

When is a Wikipedia not a Wikipedia ?

When you go from one Wikipedia to the next, you always expect an encyclopaedia. You expect things to be largely the same but in a different language. According to Bugzilla bug 13578, this is something that will change. The Alemannic community have found that having a Wikipedia, a Wikibooks, a Wiktionary and a Wikiquote is more then they can chew off.

What the Alemannic community has decided is to fold all the projects into their Wikipedia and have separate name spaces for the content of their old projects. Their communities seem to have decided on this, they want their name spaces now or they will move all their content into the Wikipedia name space.

What I wonder is if this is something that the wider community is aware off and, if this is considered to be acceptable. When such major changes are going to happen, it makes sense to include the change to the more appropriate gsw language tag.
Thanks,
GerardM

2 comments:

pfctdayelise said...

How interesting. Thanks for bringing it up. :)

David Gerard said...

As I said on foundation-l, I don't see this as inherently problematic. It fulfills the Foundation mission, it encourages educational content in that language, and a "compendium" may make sense for languages that are small on the Internet. Let's see what they do with it.