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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, agree. Wikipedia's rules are being used as a club and it's too bad.

We get it that people will abuse Wikipedia and it must suck to cull all of the ephemera people submit (not the best word for it but the only one that comes to my mind).

But I think rules should allow for nuance.

Perhaps Wikipedia should have allowed a kind of sub-Wikipedia: a sort of parallel wikipedia that deals in topics more akin to Urban Dictionary entries. Sort it's entries to the bottom of the search results, serve up a light yellow background for sub-pedia pages to make it clear these are not conforming articles. But it seems to me like a generally bad idea to be a ruthless gatekeeper for the enthusiastic and motivated contributors out there.

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> Perhaps Wikipedia should have allowed a kind of sub-Wikipedia: a sort of parallel wikipedia that deals in topics more akin to Urban Dictionary entries.

It's an interesting idea. I imagine a sort of "Official" and "Unofficial" modes. You could flip a switch and see the articles and edits that didn't pass muster.

That way, the ideas and info wouldn't be lost/censored, but wouldn't get to claim they're "formally accepted."

Alternatively you could federate it. Maintain wikipedia as the primary instance but allow users to add secondary, wikipedia community vetted wiki instances to their account so that they can seamlessly flow between them.

Those instances can serve as "incubators" for not sufficiently notable pages and then if they reach notability they can be transferred from the local "small" wiki to "big" wikipedia without losing any of the internal page information (like discussions or old revisions) or local context (still linking back to the "small" wiki).

That way you could have the default unlogged-in wikipedia which shows only the officially vetted pages but then also provide a "wider wikipedia" that includes pages that are of sufficient quality but not quite there yet. And then your local "small wikipedia" pages that don't meet the requirements to move up into the wider network yet.

This would maintain coherency between the wikis for the users who care while also allowing the core wikipedia admins and mods to focus their energy on maintaining a tight selection of well established, notable articles. And then users could choose how wide their wikipedia experience is.

> Alternatively you could federate it. Maintain wikipedia as the primary instance but allow users to add secondary, wikipedia community vetted wiki instances

Nowadays, Wikidata is playing that role already. Its concept of "notability" is flexible enough that labeled roads or individual Pokemons could handily fit there - if something is described to some minimal extent by a verifiable source, it can go in. Each Wikidata entry can contain links and "identifiers" that describe or refer to the same real-world entity in different namespaces, and you can use the Wikidata-specific browser extension Entity Explosion https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Entity_Explosion to seamlessly browse to other descriptions of any given entity as you browse the web. So the vetted "secondary" sources you're talking about don't even need to be wiki-specific, they can be practically anywhere on the web.

I kind of like that it's a different org adjacent to the old one, rather than a subsidiary. "Wiki" was always supposed to be software for thousands of various boards on different topics with no hierarchy, it makes sense that some topics would branch out of Wikipedia into their own Wiki's

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