Forum:SH Archive/French Star Wars wiki

Forums > Senate Hall archive > SH Archive/French Star Wars wiki

This page is an archive of a community-wide discussion. This page is no longer live. Further comments or questions on this topic should be made in a new Senate Hall page rather than here so that this page is preserved as a historic record. Toprawa and Ralltiir 02:43, December 24, 2010 (UTC)

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 [1],[2],[3],[4] ), 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: [5] [6][7]

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)

Discussion

Hello, Trazeris. First, I do want to commend your work on the wiki you started. In response to your statements, I have nothing against your site and no predisposition to having us link to SWWfr. Your site has come a substantially long way since I first brought up the topic. There are some good articles that you have crafted, and most of them are quite well-done. I've read through large portions of the ones you linked, and I'm impressed with the level of detail and accuracy of canon.

Before I go any further, let me address the SWWfr quickly. The creation of the category of plagiarized articles was mentioned to direct people to see what had occurred there, not as an indictment against you. (Vraiment, ce n'était pas une accusation.) After talking with a few people at Wikia, the best course of action was to delete them to honor the copyright of the other fansite. I know that you were not responsible for those articles being illegally copied. For now, we'll put the politics of the SWWfr wiki aside, even though you mentioned them above, as they are not pertinent to this discussion.

To be as straight-forward as possible: I would actually prefer linking to your site, Trazeris, instead of linking to SWWfr for the sake of this wiki. I have one substantial objection, however. Images on your site need proper attribution. I understand that the majority of images on SWWfr do not have this, and that's why some were deleted a few months back. Putting the proper attribution information is a legal issue that actually will protect you more than anything else. I understand that there are not enough hours in the day to get all of them done, but please make the effort. That's all I'm asking.

As far as the quality of articles: Yes, Trazeris, your articles are superior, and you've done quite a lot of hard work on Obi-Wan and others. At the time of my original discussion, I saw many English articles that had been copied directly. Some, not by you necessarily, had some suspect translations. After looking through the articles you linked to (and a few others), I have no problem rescinding that statement. The article quality is there for me to say it is our benefit to link to you.

I'm interested to hear what other people on this wiki have to say, but I am actually very willing vote for our links to be changed if the image situation is beginning to be handled. — Fiolli 04:13, November 18, 2010 (UTC)

  • I don't speak French and therefore can't read anything on the French wikis, but based on what I've read on this page alone, I agree with Fiolli. I support changing the links if and only if the image attribution situation is improved. Master Jonathan New Jedi Order (Jedi Council Chambers) 05:02, November 18, 2010 (UTC)
    • I speak a little French and might be able to help with the image problem if I have time (which is doubtful). I agree we should link to that wiki rather than SWWfr after the image problem is fixed. My focus will remain here though. MasterFredCommerce Guild(Whatever) 05:12, November 18, 2010 (UTC)
      • OK, I visited the site. I think it looks really good. WAY better than the default skin we're stuck with. I think I can find my way around. And I just had an idea. If we had the server power, couldn't we just make an independent Star Wars wiki alliance. It would be similar to what Mario Wiki and other Nintendo wikis have done. idk if this would cost money or what, but it sounds good to me. Then we could have all the Star Wars wikis leave Wikia and join our alliance. Anyway, idk if anyone else thinks it's a good idea. MasterFredCommerce Guild(Whatever) 05:28, November 18, 2010 (UTC)
        • We would be faced with a similar... schism if we were to split. Wikia will continue this wiki, whether there is a second one or not. While we would certainly be proving the extent of our indignation, we'd essentially be dividing the workload and splitting the contributor base. We'd have a popular wiki with a bad layout that everyone knows about and a righteous wiki with an awesome layout that no one knows about. I'm not convinced that the benefit would be worth the initial loss. SinisterSamurai 05:54, November 18, 2010 (UTC)
  • Ok I will focus on sourcing the images I have. Let me know if you have other questions. @MasterFred: well that would sure be cool but we would need money. Trazeris 13:07, November 18, 2010 (UTC)

Hello all, as promised I worked on the issue, you can check in the recent changes of Wookiepédia. FYI droit de citation is the French legal equivalent of the US fair use. Please let me know what you think. Trazeris 20:35, November 19, 2010 (UTC)