[ Please excuse me if the subject has already been beaten to death here; I am not a regular visitor to this mailing list I tried to search for this stuff here & on strategywiki, but feel free to point me to the archives! ]
I researched recently some material related to a recent catastrophic event in Polish railway history[1] and I found out that volunteers who traditionally dealt with railway matters on Polish Wikipedia have virtually disappeared. I remember that community being strong few years ago, and now we found out that even some basic information about infrastructure is left unchanged. Few people who still maintain that stuff on the Polish Wikipedia showed me that at least two other MediaWiki-based projects have been started to fill the gap: [2][3] The latter greets you even with a very nice shot of *the* railway junction that was instrumental in a recent railway crash. One of the projects got started by experienced Wikipedia editors. They still copy some of their content to the Polish Wikipedia, but only after it matures; I asked them about the reasons to go outside of the Wikipedia and they said: * They have to do lots of original research; it is impossible to follow development of the railway infrastructure and operations using only high quality published sources; * They got bitten a bit by the "notability" discussions in their field; they want to document every track, every junction and every locomotive and they are tired of discussing how "notable" a particular piece of railway equipment really is. I would have said it's just a single case, but I've seen some successful web portals being launched by people interested in history; what is different from many history research and fan pages is that I've also seen some active members of Wikipedia community becoming more and more active on those independent sites. It might be that (unproven theory) really valuable authors are living on a verge of original research; at some point they might prefer to turn over to indepedent sites. There may be other factors too: smaller, friendlier community; possibility to start anew and so on. As few of those sites are using MediaWiki software I started to call them "pre-wikis". Some of them might become a sort of a "waiting rooms" for the content to be published on "mature" Wikipedia. To me, analogy to the Wikipedia-Nupedia story is striking. What's interesting is that people are not afraid to use MediaWiki *again* (with all its well-known deficiencies). In general, I think this is nothing new. There are thousands of fan wikis on places like Wikia, where certainly some contributors copy over some mature content to Wikipedia, should licensing allow that. But maybe there is some trend that could probably be better researched, and here are my questions to you: (1) Do you see similar trend in your respective communities (preferably not only English-speaking ones)? (2) Is there a legitimate need for multi-tiered development of the knowledge-related content (test wikis, "pre-wikis", sighted revisions) or shall we pursue "flat development space" ideal? (3) Assuming we find the abovemetioned trend to be generally a good thing, shouldn't we try to research some methodologies to find out whether there is sizeable effort supporting our goals outside of the core Wikimedia movement? (4) Assuming we don't like what's going on, shouldn't we revisit some of Wikipedia core values (like "no original research", but not only) and try to address the issue there? (5) Has Wikipedia as a "product" achieved some maturity in a way that the real growth and innovation needs to go somewhere else, as no product/project lasts forever? Maybe it's something around the question that Kim Bruning asked on strategywiki [4] and also [5]: "we need to find some way to infuse new life into wikis that are coming to the end of the WikiLifeCycle. Wiki-communities can, do and will blow up, and we need to learn how to prevent it, or have plans on what to do and how to pick up the pieces." //Marcin Cieślak User:Saper from plwiki [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szczekociny_rail_crash [2] http://enkol.pl/ [3] http://semaforek.pl/wiki/index.php/Strona_g%C5%82%C3%B3wna [4] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?diff=942&oldid=931 [5] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=1075 _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
