9/11 wiki move proposal

This page is to discuss what to do with Wikipedia:sep11:In Memoriam. Wikipedia is about human knowlege and not about people's personal diaries. Wikipedia is not a web host. There are currently (and only) 317 articles on this memorial site. I do not think there is anything new to add to there and it's pretty certain this wiki wont be expanding much.

If this wiki is to stay we will have to have lots of new memorial wikis. Certainly the indosisian quake that killed over hundered thousand people was a much worse incident (strictly looking at the body count). The nuking of two Japanese cities were also a worse incident compared to 9/11 (again strictly looking at the body count). Cool CatTalk|@ 12:13, 19 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting to propose closing a project without mentioning it in the project concerned or, so far as I could see, to even one administrator there. I'll address a few of the points others have mentioned in comments:
  • The project isn't a vandalism or spam magnet. I found none in the roughly 220 edits since 21 March.
  • The project isn't dead. It's currently averaging about 10 edits a day.
  • There are two parts to this wiki:
    • The one you linked to, In Memoriam. It's mostly biographies, not personal diaries. Personally, I have no interest in this material. **The rest, intended to be more in-depth information about the attacks and their consequences. This was built in en and other languages and then largely deleted from en without being copied to the September 11 wiki. It's probably too late to get this full coverage for this event.
  • There's been minimal demand for wikis for biographies of the casualties of events in the past, like the nuclear bombing of Japan, so that seems to be a straw man argument.
  • eventname.majorevents.(wikinews or wikimedia).org might be of interest, since there is often much extremely popular high activity coverage of major events. The tsunami coverage in particular generated huge interest and major traffic growth for several weeks with a tail many months long. At present this is mostly happening in the encyclopedias, which restrict the interesting content they hold and limit the coverage significantly.
  • I suppose biographies in a sub-wiki as part of major event coverage might be useful, if completely uninteresting to me, personally. People do seem to want them and it is well established in the traditional media that they are an appropriate part of news coverage. I don't think they belong under the wikipedia domain; that's an accident of history and the original intent that this provide full coverage, not only biographies.
    • In the case of the September 11 attacks, the initial en Wikipedia coverage of events (not casualties) was fairly comprehensive but then most of it was removed, generally with "too much detail" as the reason given. That suggests to me that the approach of doing it only in encyclopedias isn't working very well. It was this removal of coverage from en Wikipedia which prompted me to get involved with the September 11th wiki - I'm interested in detailed encyclopedic coverage of major events.

Given what we know about major event coverage, using this as the basis of a trial of major events wikis seems like an interesting option, proivided we can respond fast enough in setting up for a new major event when one happens. Jamesday 03:37, 12 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]


Voting (31/9/7) edit

Move (28/3/0) edit

Move to MemoryWiki.org edit

  1. The entire wiki has degenerated into nothing but a magnet for trolls and vandals. I can't see any reason for Wikicities to host something which has never had any community behind it. Marshall Poe from memorywiki.org expressed some interest in it previously. I expect that would be a better place for it. Angela 15:11, 19 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Jon Harald Søby 15:29, 19 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Changed vote Cool CatTalk|@
    Leoadec (talk) 18:22, 19 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Changed vote. Move all the best stuff to MemoryWiki and delete what is left here. --Daniel Mayer 18:50, 19 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Changed vote. Hégésippe | ±Θ± 19:30, 19 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  6. Ausir 20:10, 19 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  7. --JAranda | watz sup 21:03, 19 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  8. Shervin Afshar 22:06, 19 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  9. --Shizhao 00:44, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  10. Korg + + 01:01, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  11. --Millosh 21:36, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  12. Sure, since this one has the most votes, move it to MemoryWiki.org, /dev/null, or the nearest black hole. Wherever you put it it has no business being a Wikimedia project. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 23:47, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  13. Might as well list here too. I am also fine with it going anywhere else. - Taxman 00:25, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  14. It really should be a subdomain of Wikipedia, but I don't see how it needs to be deleted either. It also seems off to put it on a commercial site and Wikisource seems off too. I think this could have its own domain. - Mgm|[[User talk:MacGyverMagic|<sup>(talk)</sup>]] 11:40, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  15. Gdarin | talk 11:58, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  16. Darkoneko 12:35, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  17. That Guy, From That Show! 17:44, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  18. 555 21:31, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  19. Support per Angela.-Gadfium 01:38, 22 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  20. Per Angela. --Jeffrey O. Gustafson 03:06, 22 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  21. Good idea Tuf-Kat 06:19, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  22. Let them take what they want, but get rid of the rest. The wub 15:04, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  23. Mushin 15:20, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  24. Good idea. jni 19:09, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  25. WebBoy 15:09, 25 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  26. Kaldari 00:09, 26 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  27. Bratsche 03:55, 27 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  28. And delete the rest. GeorgeStepanek 09:24, 8 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Comments edit

As Marshall Poe (founder of MemoryWiki) has stated here, all the memoirs (which MemoryWiki is about) have already been imported - it's free content, after all. The imported documents are here and are mostly "This is what happened to me on 9/11" type stories. What remains exclusively on sep11.wikipedia.org are the tributes to individuals and companies. These are pages which were originally created on Wikipedia as articles, and then moved to sep11 when people argued that the individuals weren't notable enough. Consequently, some of them are written in an NPOV fashion, others are not. These are quite a lot of pages.

It's unlikely that MW would accept these pages - it's not a dumping ground for just anything, or a wiki memorial site, it's a database of personal experiences. So I would suggest that those who voted "Move to MemoryWiki" look at the remaining content on sep11.wikipedia.org which has not been imported yet, and decide whether they consider it worthy of preservation or not. If it is considered valuable, Angela has already stated that she would prefer not to have it on Wikicities (which also doesn't accept just everything people want to host somewhere), because there's no community for it, so making a static HTML dump seems like the most viable option.

NB: Voting is not evil, but having a vote without collecting information and arguments first is silly. :-)--Eloquence 19:17, 19 January 2006 (UTC) (hosting provider for MemoryWiki)[reply]


Isn't that a clear copyright violation? They're using a CC license while sep11 uses the GFDL (the two are incompatable), I took a quick look at some of the articles they copied over and there's no mention of them being under the GFDL. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 23:53, 20 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That would be a minor copyright violation. MemoryWiki uses CC-BY-2.5, which is compatible with GFDL, but only in the other direction.
Even the Wikimedia projects themselves have these violations. Wikibooks:en:Wikibooks:Neutral point of view was a copyright violation until recently, because it had not attributed this MetaWikipedia for copying our Neutral point of view page.
Significantly, if I moved an article from en.Wikipedia to sep11.Wikipedia today, that would also be a copyright violation. En is using GFDL 1.2 or later, but sep11 never specifies a version of the GFDL. Thus, sep11 is granting both GFDL 1.1 and 1.2 licenses; the GFDl 1.1, to me, seems slightly incompatible with the GFDL 1.2 used by en. --Kernigh 00:25, 26 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it's a copyright infringement unless the proper license is being described for that content - I haven't looked to see if it is. There's no reason a wiki can't have multiple licenses for different parts of the conent, so the solution is easy enough: just say that only the GFDL license for those pages and make sure that the full history is also available. Jamesday 03:37, 12 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipeople + Wikifamily + Wikimemory + 9/11 wiki? --Shizhao 19:21, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]


When should the vote be "closed"? Should an administrator do it? --Cool CatTalk|@ 19:14, 1 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Move to wikicities edit

Cool CatTalk|@ 12:13, 19 January 2006 (UTC) Angelas suggestion is better. --Cool CatTalk|@ 16:41, 19 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Daniel Mayer (aka mav) 12:48, 19 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hégésippe | ±Θ± 13:17, 19 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  1. Mathias Schindler 13:21, 19 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Ausir 00:42, 25 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  3. 200.159.32.26 16:25, 24 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Move to Wikisource edit

Delete (9) edit

Completely edit

  1. --Nina 12:59, 19 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Taxman 20:21, 19 January 2006 (UTC), but I'm ok with moving it to any non Wikimedia foundation project that wants it. There just wasn't an option above for move to any.[reply]
  3. like userboxes , wikigames, etc... they don't help to reach the encyclopedia goal, it's a sensible thing but doesn't belongdrini 21:46, 23 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Move to /dev/null. Anybody who finds its content useful can take it to somewhere else before. Leoadec (talk) 18:51, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Ausir 00:42, 25 January 2006 (UTC) - I support either option, it just shouldn't be a subdomain of Wikipedia[reply]
  6. Phroziac (talk) 14:44, 25 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  7. Most content already copied to MemoryWiki. --Pmsyyz 15:17, 25 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  8. Move to /dev/null. It's free content and it's been around for long enough that anyone who finds it useful has had ample time to copy or fork it (e.g. Memory Wiki). Let's just get rid of the thing. Trilobite 17:16, 20 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  9. Close it, make a database-dump, delete the site, redirect the subdomain to www.wikipedia.org. Whatever people want to with the database, I really don't care, allthough it still will be GFDL. Jeroenvrp 11:51, 10 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Keep (7) edit

Turn to archive only version (like Nostalgia Wikipedia) edit

  1. --Roberth 13:46, 19 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Eloquence 16:28, 19 January 2006 (UTC) - that's what the HTML dumper is for. Give it a nice domain name and be done with it.[reply]
  3. TOR 08:49, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  4. But not on a Wikipedia subdomain. sep11.wikimedia.org would be fine. Mind you, I'd have no problems with deleting it either, but I think that's not going to happen. --Grm wnr 20:46, 21 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  5. But not on a Wikipedia subdomain, as Grm wnr said. --Kernigh 23:50, 25 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  6. Tuck it away and let it sip bandwidth. The project is basically static anyway. silsor 23:34, 27 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  7. --Marbot 22:49, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]