Forum:SH Archive/French Star Wars wiki

Hi all

First of all, please excuse my English as I am no native speaker. I may sound rude or arrogant please remember it's not willlingly.

Anyway as some of you may know, I'm the admin of Wookiepédia, a French wiki on Star Wars. I recently came accross this entry in your Consensus Track, quite unfortunate I didn't see it earlier. Here I only want to answer some questions and clarify my position on some remarks made by Fiolli and others.

Some background for the (majority of) people who don't know about the French Star Wars wiki (SWWfr) and what happened there last year. There were a few contributors and many low quality articles. I wanted mainly to be able to make a layout independant of Wikia and also to be free of ads. I made Wookiepédia and asked the people over to SWWfr if they wanted to join me (ie. merge the wikis in Wookiepédia). I advanced some arguments(French) why I thought it was better to be off Wikia than on it.

Answers

I will answer some remarks made by Fiolli now:


 * 1) quality of articles: We have some good  quality articles (also ,,, ), but for now I won't say that Wookiepédia is of really higher quality than SWWfr. Nonetheless when we merged the 2 wikis, I imported all articles from SWWfr except the plagiarized ones.
 * 2) plagiarized articles: Fiolli said I was the one who added the category for these articles, which is true, actually I know the webmaster of the French encyclopedia (biggest French on SW, btw). I didn't just delete these articles because I thought it would have been misperceived, apparently the categorization was also misperceived.
 * 3) not all users departed: I must absolutely disagree with Fiolli when he says that "not all" the users left the Wikia hosted wiki. At that time every contributors chose to move — see the poll (Fusion means merge). Of course now we have 'one' or 'two' users on SWWfr because 1) Wikia did not accept to leave a notice on the main page that the community chose to leave 2) I was not able to tell them because I was blacklisted for doing it (despite the fact that Angela agreed to it — see "It's fine to add a message there explaining that some people have left and that new admins are needed here")
 * 4) work sporadic level: that is unfortunately true, BUT I will again say that we had not many contributors on SWWfr.
 * 5) The new site takes material from sites such as ours and simply translates them, possibly by machine: That is really unfair, I never used an automatic translator and I'm quite proud of the result (Kenobi on Wookipédia). It took me months to translate this article, I've just finished it (that is why I found this Forum entry btw) and saying I've done it using a machine is really rude, to be polite.
 * 6) License: I recognise GFDL is not compatible with CC-BY-SA (though at the time I imported content from Wookieepedia it was under GFDL). I plan to change this as soon as possible.
 * 7) Copyright issues: I agree Wookiepédia as SWWfr does not respect copyrights. But I don't have the resources for now to concentrate on it. When you began did you have it right?

Wikia

Well one of my point for leaving SWWfr was that Wikia could do anything they want with the content and the layout of their sites... "Told you so" might well represent the way I feel here: [Forum:CT:Official_Wookieepedia_Skin:_Monobook&t=20101116165649]

I understand your position and why you find Wikia the best solution for you, but please do not impose your choices to others.

Your move

Well I think that pretty all I had to say. I don't know if you would agree to reconsider you decision, Wookiepédia is arguably not better than SWWfr for the moment, that's because I don't get enough audience. Being linked from Wookieepedia would be a very big point when I'm asking French fan sites to publish a news on Wookiepédia for example. Anyway I can't ask anything, it's up to you. (FYI Jedipedia and Bibliotheka Ossus changed their interwiki links to Wookiepédia)

PS: Also several months ago someone blacklisted me on the French Wikia just for saying to newcomers that people on the wiki had decided to switch over to Wookiepédia, I never compelled anyone to do anything and that was quite rude in my opinion.

Trazeris 20:42, November 16, 2010 (UTC)