Template talk:Wikipedia Copy

From Free Talk Live

This seems like as good a place as any to list the reasons why copying pages from Wikipedia is A Bad Thing(tm):

• It's completely unnecessary. Wikipedia pages go into far more detail than pages on this wiki need to. If someone reads an article on our wiki, it's most likely because they want to learn the libertarian viewpoint on the topic. If they want encyclopedic detail, they'll look it up in an encyclopedia. We can easily link them to the appropriate Wikipedia page ike so: [[w:Article|Article]]
• It's unmanageable. Copying text over from Wikipedia is a one-time event; any subsequent modifications to the Wikipedia page are not mirrored here. Any factual errors, spelling mistakes, etc. will get corrected much slower here than on Wikipedia because of the fact that Wikipedia's userbase is several thousand times larger than ours. Regularly updating our pages with the latest Wikipedia version is even more unmanageable, because of the difficulty in merging any edits done here with the latest version from Wikipedia.
• It creates confusing, poorly written pages. Wikipedia pages are written from a neutral point of view and are as unbiased as possible. This wiki, by necessity, has no policy on bias - we're all libertarians, so it's going to be hard to write unbiased articles about a lot of things. Combining unbiased facts and biased opinions in one page makes it look like the author is schizophrenic.
• It's also confusing to new users. They may see pages copied over from Wikipedia and falsely assume that we have a policy of NPOV or unbiasedness, and be reluctant to make edits that create bias.

--Rabidfurby 16:52, 15 March 2006 (Eastern Standard Time)

Argument for copying articles

I personally see no problems with copying articles so long as all the formatting is clean. There are naturally going to be lots of topics that we need articles for on this wiki that already have articles on wikipedia that are very well written. Theres no need to do double work and re-write these topics from scratch. After copying such articles over a section such as "Libertarian thoughts on...." can be added to these articles. Argash 21:03, 15 March 2006 (Eastern Standard Time)

I see your point, but copying over WP articles creates even more duplication of work. For example, our Steve Kubby page, which was originally copied from WP, has nothing about his release or his recent re-incarceration. WP's article on him does. Should we copy that new section over to our wiki? If so, how should we deal with any edits on our page that conflict with the latest WP version? How often should we check WP pages for additions and copy them over to our wiki? It's clear that as we copy more pages over from Wikipedia, this will quickly become very time-consuming.

So what's the solution? I think it's division of labor - we let WP concern itself with the gory details of a subject, we concern ourselves with how that subject relates to libertarianism. What I'd like to see is a one- or two-paragraph summary of a topic, sourced (not copied, but paraphrased and rewritten) from Wikipedia (or wherever else), followed by Libertarian arguments about that topic. The External Links section would then have a link to the WP article, and whatever other links are appropriate. Using the Steve Kubby page as an example again, we would have our couple-paragraph summary of the history of his case, followed by Libertarian viewpoints on the matter. We don't need his medical history or quotes about the case; those are minor details that are better handled by WP. When something like Kubby's release happens, it's easy to do a one-sentence update to our summary with something like "He was released from jail on _date_. --Rabidfurby 23:01, 15 March 2006 (Eastern Standard Time)

The W: tag

Is there a way to make it so that when you use the W: tag to link to a wikipedia article that the w: wont show up? currently

[[w:George W. Bush]]

shows up as with the w: in front w:George W. Bush it would be much nicer if the w: didn't show up Argash 00:27, 18 March 2006 (Eastern Standard Time)

As I said above, you use this: [[w:Article|Article]]. The pipe character '|' can be used to redirect any Wiki link - for example [[Main Page|here]] lets you link to the main page like this: here. --Rabidfurby 21:27, 18 March 2006 (Eastern Standard Time)