Includipedia:About
From Includipedia, the inclusionist encyclopedia
- This page is an introduction to the Includipedia project for visitors. There is also an encyclopedia article on Includipedia.
Have you ever created or edited an article on Wikipedia only to have someone delete it? How did that make you feel? I'm sure you weren't happy. Well, guess what, it's happened to us as well -- and that's why we've created Includipedia.
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Inclusionism versus deletionism
Imagine that you're writing an encyclopedia from scratch. There are some subjects that you would obviously want to cover, such as the Eiffel Tower or Calculus. There are others that you wouldn't feature, such as the boil on your big toe. Then there are the millions of topics that fall between these two extremes, and how many of these you decide to include in your encyclopedia determines your position in the inclusionism versus deletionism continuum.
The Wikipedia article Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia says this about the two philosophies:
- Inclusionism and deletionism are opposing philosophies in Wikipedia regarding the criteria for including or deleting content.
- On Wikipedia, deletionists generally argue for the deletion of articles that are short and poorly written, unreferenced or referenced only by Web-based sources and blogs, that appear to fail the community standards of notability, or that exclusively contain trivia or popular culture references.
- Inclusionists call for retaining more content, for higher tolerance of "stub" articles, and an acceptance of notable blogs and other Web-based sources.
We don't think deletionists are bad people, of course. In fact, we think that deletionism has its place--but that place is not Includipedia.
Includipedia and inclusionism
The main difference between Includipedia and Wikipedia is that Includipedia will have an Inclusionst policy.
When people's work is trashed by deletionists, they become discouraged from contributing to Wikipedia. If many good Wikipedia editors get disgruntled with Wikipedia's deletionists, the important work of creating a repository of all information is harmed.
Why shouldn't every film, every TV programme episode, every small-circulation magazine, every pokemon character, etc have an article about it, if people want to write those articles? People who aren't interested in these subjects won't read them, and people who are interested will find them useful.
Includipedia and Wikipedia
You might infer from the above that we're not big fans of Wikipedia.
If you did, you'd be wrong. I've been a Wikipedia editor since 2001, and I still think that for all its flaws, Wikipedia has made an enormous contribution to the common good.
But we also think that there's a need for an inclusionist version of Wikipedia.
We don't see Includipedia so much as a rival to Wikipedia, but as a complement. Includipedia is starting off by forking Wikipedia, that is copying all its content; we hope that, in time, Includipedia will be home for many tentative, still-under-construction articles that when polished will perhaps be copied back into Wikipedia.
Includipedia will help Wikipedia in other ways. Both sites use the MediaWiki software, and when we add features to that software, we'll release them so the whole community can benefit. And we're also writing tools that will interact with MediaWiki websites, including Bots, and these will also be released under an Open Source license.
And some of Includipedia's advertising revenue will be fed back into supporting open content projects, including Wikipedia.
Future directions for Includipedia
As well as being an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia, Includipedia has other goals. Our ultimate aim is to bring all the world's information to all the world's people. To further this, we intend to:
- create a catalog of all the world's books. These will obviously be cross-referenced by author. If the text is out of copyright or open content, we'll include it, or a link to it.
- ditto for all movies and TV episodes. Actors, directors, producers, etc will all be cross-referenced.
- ditto for all music. Again, we will cross-reference by composers, lyricists, singers, performers, etc.
- ditto for all open source software.
