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Comment by selmnoo | Hacker News Reader

So, uh, what exactly is 'wikimedia'? How is it different from the straight-up 'Wikipedia'? This article seems like it should have been on Wikipedia, but it's on Wikimedia. I've never seen an article of this nature being hosted on wikimedia. What's going on here?

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Wikimedia is the parent project of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikinews, and so on.

The wikimedia wiki is used for documentation and discussion on the topic of running a wiki, and on specifically running MediaWiki (the underlying software that powers these sites).

Since this is an article about a topic relevant to running wikis, it's on the meta wiki. It is unlikely to be notable enough to meet the criteria for being included in Wikipedia; in order to avoid everyone creating their own personal Wikipedia page or a Wikipedia page for their high school band or the like, which can be very hard to ensure is high quality and accurate, Wikipedia has notability and verifiability requirements. Something must be notable enough to have been published by several existing reputable sources in order to meet this guideline.

It's fairly likely that Cunningham's Law does not meet those criteria. But the Wikimedia meta-wiki has less formal requirements, and its topic is explicitly discussion about running wikis, so this winds up there.

If you click on the logo, you can see this described straight from the source: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

"Welcome to Meta-Wiki, the global community site for the Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia movement in general. Meta-Wiki's discussions range from coordination and documentation to planning and analysis of future Wikimedia activities."

Where is a right place to put Russian translation of this article?

The final version would belong at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law?setlang=r...

The first step is to read the article at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Translate/Page...

The complete list of steps is at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Preparing_a_page_...

Sorry, I didn't realize it was so complicated to do this.

In the spirit of this law I just added Russian translation to the end of English article in hope that somebody competent would move it.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham's_Law#Russian_Tra...

2 hours later, it appears to have worked!

Actually about 13 minutes later:

http://i.imgur.com/Jl2xdpy.png

> It is unlikely to be notable enough to meet the criteria for being included in Wikipedia

Why? Wikipedia is an encyclopedia [1], there is no need to keep the amount of pages low, storage is cheap and no one prints out Wikipedia on real paper.

The "not notable enough" is a real threat to Wikipedia and the future of the project. The German Wikipedia already lost a lot of former authors (volunteers) because of admins gone crazy. They don't want anyone to edit "their" pages, and revert and ban almost every new edit/user. You can read about this serious situation on Heise.de [2]. Read also the 650+ comments of the related discussion [3]. The English version is still better in shape, but it moves in the same direction, unfortunately.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia

[2] http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Blutet-Wikipedia-aus-... ; Translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&pre...

[3] http://www.heise.de/newsticker/foren/S-Blutet-Wikipedia-aus/...

Edit: I am not against "notability requirement", with a better balance it's fine. Wikimedia Foundation should have a closer look at the German branch... maybe resetting all "admin" privileges would help?

The idea is to prevent Wikipedia being turned into a tool for self-promotion. An example would be if I created a page for my name describing myself as a spelling consultant, then went to every article that mentioned a high-profile spelling blooper and added a line like 'without the services of a spelling consultant, such as [[hmsimha]]'.

It's not about storage or page count. It's about quality and relevant material. When I search for "band" (disambiguation) I wouldn't want to end up seeing a list of every high school band in the western hemisphere. It's just not important enough (to enough people) to include as part of an encyclopedia.

Various people have been claiming for years that the "notability" requirement is a threat to Wikipedia. Yet the project is still around and is still the go-to source for encyclopedic information.

I go to Google for information. Sometimes it puts a Wikipedia page high in the results, and many times it doesn't.

Deletionism[0] is what's killing Wikipedia.

Gwern's page, In Defense of Inclusionism[1] has a good summary of both sides, and argues all of the points I would make.

[0]: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism [1]: http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism

Yeah, it's a tough balance to keep. I think that notability requirements are important to avoid Wikipedia from becoming an unmaintainable, unverifiable pile of junk; but that there are some people who are way to quick to delete or revert, some people who are way too protective of "their" pages, and some admins who are a bit out of control.

It's a tough balance to keep; I don't pretend to have a good answer for how to steer it in a better direction. I have been an off and on contributor to Wikipedia for years, but never enough to get involved in the politics or become an admin.

Wikimedia is a Microsoft project and targets small businesses.

You almost got me.

There is actually a page that explains the differences between Wikipedia, Wikimedia and MediaWiki: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipmediawiki . Naming is hard.

Wikimedia is a parent organization of wikipedia and several other reference projects.

wikimedia is the parent organization of wikipedia. Since this is meta.wikimedia.org I am assuming it is a site for meta discussions.

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