Mailing List Archive

On Sep 17, 2004, at 8:05 AM, Chris Phoenix wrote:
> I'm building a site, http://Wise-Nano.org, using MediaWiki software.
> It will hopefully grow into a big collaborative informational project,
> but with a specific purpose: to analyze the implications and risks of
> advanced nanotechnology, and make wise policy.
>
> Should I join the MediaWiki project family, or is this too
> special-purpose?

I'm not aware of any particular 'MediaWiki project family'. You may be
thinking of the Wikimedia Foundation, the umbrella organization running
Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc. MediaWiki is just the wiki software,
nothing more.

> Are there any conventions or expectations for narrow clone projects
> using MediaWiki's look and feel, linking to their help pages, etc?

You are of course welcome to link. If you copy help pages from
meta.wikipedia.org or another Wikipedia project, be sure to respect the
license of those pages (GNU Free Documentation License).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Yes, I was thinking of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects. Would
Wise-Nano or Nanopedia (the hoped-for end product) be a good addition to
that group of projects?

If my site uses a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, does
that fulfill the Gnu license, or do I have to include Gnu boilerplate on
any text I copy from a Gnu'd site?

Chris

Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Sep 17, 2004, at 8:05 AM, Chris Phoenix wrote:
>
>> I'm building a site, http://Wise-Nano.org, using MediaWiki software.
>> It will hopefully grow into a big collaborative informational project,
>> but with a specific purpose: to analyze the implications and risks of
>> advanced nanotechnology, and make wise policy.
>>
>> Should I join the MediaWiki project family, or is this too
>> special-purpose?
>
>
> I'm not aware of any particular 'MediaWiki project family'. You may be
> thinking of the Wikimedia Foundation, the umbrella organization running
> Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc. MediaWiki is just the wiki software, nothing
> more.
>
>> Are there any conventions or expectations for narrow clone projects
>> using MediaWiki's look and feel, linking to their help pages, etc?
>
>
> You are of course welcome to link. If you copy help pages from
> meta.wikipedia.org or another Wikipedia project, be sure to respect the
> license of those pages (GNU Free Documentation License).
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> MediaWiki-l mailing list
> MediaWiki-l@Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

--
Chris Phoenix cphoenix@CRNano.org
Director of Research
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology http://CRNano.org

Chris-
> Yes, I was thinking of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects. Would
> Wise-Nano or Nanopedia (the hoped-for end product) be a good addition to
> that group of projects?

> If my site uses a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, does
> that fulfill the Gnu license, or do I have to include Gnu boilerplate on
> any text I copy from a Gnu'd site?

1) The appropriate list to discuss whether a particular project can be
part of the Wikimedia set of projects is
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
I've therefore CC'd my response there.

2) Generally, Wikimedia projects are very broad. There is only one notable
exception to that rule, the recently created Wikispecies (which is why I
think it should be incorporated into a larger Wikidata project).

It has been proposed in the past to have a "Wikipolicy" project as a sort
of open brainstorming space for determining useful political policies on
various issues. That might be an idea worth developing further, but I
would oppose a narrow project like Wise-Nano.

3) All text-centric projects are under the GNU FDL (Wikispecies licensing
is not decided yet), so that would have to be the license to use.

Regards,

Erik