User:Leucosticte/Inclupedia

Inclupedia will be both a mirror of, and a supplement to Wikipedia; in other words, Wikipedia content will be a subset of Inclupedia content.

In this w:Venn diagram:
A is Inclupedia content
B is Wikipedia content

Inclupedia is an upcoming wiki that will be a combination mirror of, and supplement to, Wikipedia. Its purpose will be to serve as an encyclopedia taking advantage of the content already existing on Wikipedia while also including verifiable content deemed too non-notable for inclusion on Wikipedia. Two types of pages will exist on Inclupedia:

1. Pages that exist on Wikipedia, and whose complete and up-to-date revision histories are mirrored on Inclupedia using MirrorTools.
2. Pages that were deleted from Wikipedia, or have been created from scratch on Inclupedia by Inclupedia users.

Pages of the second kind can be edited on Inclupedia. Clicking the "Edit" tab on pages of the first kind will take the user to the appropriate edit screen on Wikipedia.

Inclupedia will depend upon constant API queries to obtain the text of recent revisions. This should not put any heavier of a burden on the servers than any of Wikipedia's antivandal bots. In fact, it could even relieve some of the burden by providing another wiki that people can query for Wikipedia content. Further, Inclupedia will tend to attract the creation of pages on "non-notable" topics that users might otherwise be tempted to post to Wikipedia in hopes that no one would notice for awhile.

Comparison to existing wikis

Inclupedia, as compared to existing wikis

Wiki	Notability requirement	Verifiability requirement	Neutral point of view requirement	Editable wiki	Integrated with Wikipedia	Encyclopedia format	WMF- affiliated
Wikipedia	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Inclupedia	No	Somewhat	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Wikibooks	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Somewhat	No	Yes
Wikinfo	No	Somewhat	No	Yes	No	Yes	No
Wikia	No	Depends	Depends	Yes	No	Depends	No
Deletionpedia	No	No	No	No	Somewhat	Yes	No

FAQ

General Questions

• Why do you need to mirror Wikipedia?
  • Because it's necessary in order to integrate with Wikipedia reasonably seamlessly. The wikisphere is littered with wikis like Wikinfo that failed because they didn't adequately integrate with Wikipedia. Here are some areas in which mirror-based integration would be helpful:
    • Categories. If you have Category:Dogs on Inclupedia, that category is not as useful if its only members are Inclupedia articles, e.g. Foofie (dog belonging to John Smith). You want it to also include Dog grooming, history of dogs, and all the other topics in that category on Wikipedia. You want the Inclupedia categories to fit into the larger Wikipedia categorization scheme.
    • Page existence detection. Red/blue existence-detecting wikilinks are also facilitated by the Wikipedia mirror; if your article says "Foofie is a dog," you want dog to be a blue link to the Wikipedia article if such article exists, or you want it to be red if there is no such article either on Inclupedia or Wikipedia.
    • Templates. It is useful to be able to transclude templates directly from Wikipedia, without having to constantly have an authorized user import them as they are updated.
• OK, but why does the Wikipedia mirror have to be up-to-date at all times?
  • Ideally, Inclupedia editors should never need to edit Wikipedia directly again; they should be able to make all the edits they need to make through Inclupedia. And to do that, it's imperative that the Wikipedia mirror be absolutely up to date. Also, the mirror is where the revisions of articles deleted from Wikipedia are collected from; if it's not up to date, some revisions will be missing. Lastly, integrated watchlists won't be of much use unless the recent changes table is kept up to date with data about Wikipedia article revisions.
• Why not use Wikia for non-notable articles?
  • Wikia suffers from the same lack of integration as Wikipedia; plus it is so fragmented that most of its wikis are unable to sustain a community.
• How will page moves work?
  • The general rule is that when a user moves a page on Wikipedia, all the revisions under Wikipedia's control move. All the Inclupedia-only revisions stay put, although they may be buried under a redirect.

Policy Questions

• Does Inclupedia plan on mirroring content which was deleted due to it containing non-free copyrighted content? What about articles deleted due to "attack" content?
  • Illegal content such as copyvios has to be deleted wherever it appears, because otherwise the government is likely to impose civil and/or criminal penalties.
• What is the plan for handling non-CSD deletions like and , where the deletion reasons are not always clear?
  • Usually some sort of reason is provided in PRODs and AFDs. But Inclupedia can make its own judgments as to whether an article contains verifiable content not adequately covered elsewhere; if the article contains nothing salvageable, then it should and will remain deleted from Inclupedia too. Since PROD and AFD are not supposed to be used for getting rid of illegal content, that should not be a cause for concern in reference to articles deleted through those processes.
• What is the position of Inclupedia on when that person is non-notable and does not want an article?
  • Information that is verifiable by cited reliable sources, and not prohibited by law from being posted, should remain. As for less reliable sources, we must disclose the reliability, or lack thereof, of those sources. Depending on what's required by law, we may have to do more than that.
• What if there is an article that, while verifiable by reliable sources, is about a subject about which so little is known that the article cannot grow beyond one or two sentences?
  • It should probably be merged into a larger article.
• Should the default be to delete articles and revisions from Inclupedia when they are deleted from Wikipedia, and let an Inclupedia sysop resurrect them if he sees fit? Or should the default be to not delete articles and revisions from Inclupedia unless the deleting sysop as Wikipedia has specifically checked the box to do so?
  • If we want to satisfy people's concerns about potential backlogs of harmful/illegal content waiting to be deleted from Inclupedia, we should probably set it to delete it from Inclupedia by default, and let the deleting sysop at Wikipedia check a box to not delete it from Inclupedia, if he deems it to be deletable only by reason of non-notability. But I'd prefer to lean toward keeping content as a default; it should be innocent till proven guilty.
• Who will be sysops at Inclupedia?
  • Whoever wants the job and hasn't given indications that they would be a poor sysop. Actually, we aim to create a hierarchy of guardians (aka sysops), lieutenants, captains, and so on, which should allow for more sysops and even bureaucrat-equivalents to be created, because there will be a lot of higher-ranking officers to keep them in check.
• Will Inclupedians have power to view and undelete articles that were deleted from Wikipedia?
  • Yup, to the extent we were able to get hold of those revisions before the pages were deleted.

Technical Questions

• Is there a similar project like this already, and if so, why would we want to duplicate its efforts?
  • There does not seem to be. A few sites, such as Answers.com, share a few commonalities in that they are mirror/supplements of Wikipedia, but they are not editable wikis.
• Who is responsible for maintenance of the software for the changes required for this project? Have they agreed to manage another large project like this?
  • At first, it's going to be me, User:Leucosticte, creating a minimum viable product.

Bugs

• bugzilla:59618 — [MirrorTools] Should mirror all revisions and log actions that occur on the remote wiki