Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2016 February 9

= February 9 =

Sharing a Wikipedia post
How might I share this with other Wikipedians? It looks at Wikipedia a few years ago, and examines the open content phenomenon. Openness vs Authority.BooksXYZ (talk) 04:12, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
 * You could contact The Signpost and see if they are interested. Warofdreams talk 14:01, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Will do, thanks.BooksXYZ (talk) 02:52, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
 * It's worth mentioning that the description of the WikiMedia board from 2006 doesn't apply today. Things have gotten a lot better in the intervening decade. SteveBaker (talk) 15:44, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Although there have been at least 2 recent major controversies relating to the board. I wonder what "create their own proprietary, for-profit version of Wikipedia" is about. There was a fair degree of controversy surrounding wikia but while there are some similarities (including 2 board members), the description there is not particularly accurate if it refers to wikia. Wikia already existed for 2 years by 2006-2007 (expanding and changing but it wasn't a new project). And it used the open source MediaWiki and shared resources with the WMF, but not much of wikipedia content. (I think some deleted stuff was sometimes copied there and some articles were used but AFAIK this was done by individual projects not by any board members.) So if it is about wikia, it's not a particularly accurate. Mind you that entire story seems to keep referring to wikipedia when it sounds like it's often referring to the WMF, so perhaps it's not that surprising. Nil Einne (talk) 12:18, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
 * It's certainly easy to get confused between:
 * a "Wiki" - which is a style of website authoring and management found all over the web)
 * "MediaWiki" - which is a piece of open-source software that's at the heart of most - but certainly not all - of the Wiki's out there),
 * "Wikipedia" - which is an encyclopedia that is one of many Wiki's that happens to use MediaWiki)
 * "WikiMedia" (strictly: "The WikiMedia Foundation", or WMF) - which is the non-profit organization that formally owns the servers and other infrastructure on which MediaWiki is mostly developed and Wikipedia is situated).
 * "WikiCommons", "Wiktionary" and a bunch of other "WikiXXX" projects - that also use MediaWiki and run on WikiMedia's servers - but are not strictly a part of Wikipedia. Confusingly, much of Wikipedia's content (especially photos and video) is stored in those other projects and they cross-link to each other in ways that are almost invisible to the naive user - even though they are mostly independent.
 * So it's a complicated picture that almost every journalist gets horribly wrong. Whoever named MediaWiki and WikiMedia so confusingly should have been slapped with a wet fish!  SteveBaker (talk) 03:56, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Face-devil-grin.svg: Can I use an Octopus -- Apostle (talk) 09:56, 14 February 2016 (UTC)