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Comment by shabda | Hacker News Reader

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...

This page is a lovely example of why I don't contribute to wikipedia anymore.

All the arguments are along the lines of, we should delete/keep this, because (WP:A, WP:B, WP:NO, WP:YES, meatpuppets, sockpuppets, random wikipedia lingo, inuslt to people who do not know wikiepda lingo)

I agree shared vocabulary helps communication, but on wikipedia it has become an active tool to discourage new editors. Sad as at one point I believed wikipedia to be the best thing to happen to Internet.

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You do realize WP:N, WP:ATTP, WP:RS, etc. are all links to the policies being referenced, right? You're complaining that they're linking to policy pages to defend their opinions. If lawyers provided hyperlinks to every law they mentioned, I'd be ecstatic.

Lawyers at least have to argue their points in front of a jury of laypersons. On Wikipedia, the only audience for this kind of thing is other wiki fanatics, so it just becomes more and more insular.

Also, that is kind of like the ultimate wiki defense: "any obscure terms are linked so my writing doesn't have to be clear".

Lawyers are barred from making legal arguments directly to the jury. Judges hold the prerogative of instructing the jury on the law. Lawyers only make arguments about evidence, motivation, etc. to the jury.

Yes, but I am not a (wikipedia) lawyer, and so I dont need/want/have the inclination to justify my actions with an alphabet soup. I just want to contribute, (and hopefully want to see is stay).

Out of curiosity, are there any Wikipedia forks?

*BSD guys had a lot of similar arguments and they ended up with many flavors of BSD (OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD etc.)

Some spammers mirror it.. But that's about it.

If you can work out a good way to share most edits between the forks --- because most edits won't be a source of argument --- then you have a fighting chance.

It could be as simple as mirroring wikipedia but never propagating the deletions. Trying to edit an article would redirect one to wikipedia; trying to edit a deleted article would instead edit the local copy (in the event of the article being recreated on wikipedia at a later date there could be an automatic upstream merge).

This might be a good start. Though you will also want to keep links to the deleted articles alive.

If you took half a second to look through the "New pages" feed, and saw not only the hideous quality and dubious nature of nearly all newly created pages, but also the vast quantity of new articles created every few minutes, you might rethink your position on keeping all deleted articles. Many new articles deserve speedy deletion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewPages

Ok, so only add pages to the mirror that are older than N days or have more than M (non-reverted) edits. Probably you'd also need to have tracking for when page names change. It's not a deal-breaker.

That's a good point. I'll have to think about this.

There is the Levitation Project which attempts to port Mediawiki to a Git backend. It was spawned out of pretty much this very same discussion in the German Wikipedia.

http://levit.at/ion/wiki/Main_Page

I started an inclusionist fork called includipedia -- http://www.includipedia.com/ -- though I've not developed it fully.

Larry Sanger (co-creator of Nupedia and Wikipedia) forked it into Citizendium in an attempt to re-infuse a healthy respect for elite, specialist, academic, or otherwise expert knowledge. Hasn't really taken off and Larry Sanger is now emeritus.

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