WikiGuide

The goal of WikiGuide is to provide a place to put the not-so-encyclopedic stuff of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites. This was designed after a day of surfing Wikipedia and feeling like Wikipedia is in this wishy-washy state of kind of like an encyclopedia and kind of not. Project proposals like Essentialpedia describe this feeling better and what to do about it, and coincidentally WikiGuide can cooperate these types of projects to make Wikipedia more of your typical encyclopedia.

This is a proposal for a new Wikimedia sister project.

WikiGuide
Status of the proposal
Status	closed
Reason	No significant interactions since April 2010. --Sannita (talk) 15:20, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Below is an expanding of the summary, along with an idea of how things should run.

I don't get it; What's the point?

Ah, good question. The point is to provide all the perfectly valid information Wikipedia can't provide because it doesn't meet a one or two of the stricter guidelines, and to help clarify in slightly simpler terms some of Wikipedia's more confusing articles (some of you may point to simple.wikipedia.org as serving this purpose; they mean simple as in vocabulary, not as in length. The Simple English Wikipedia is for those learning English, and as stated before there is only a Simple English, no Simple Russian/Japanese/Esperanto/What-have-you).

As stated above, this would work well with other proposed projects, such as Essentialpedia, that wish to make Wikipedia more of an encyclopedia.

Please remember this: WikiGuide is not a cesspool for the random junk from Mr. Grandercamp in apartment 32A. WikiGuide will be held up to quality guidelines similar to Wikipedia's (and other WikiMedia projects). The guidelines mainly differ in the style of articles (as described below).

If it helps, compare Wikipedia to a traditional encyclopedia, or a book dedicated to a certain subject. When you get one of these to read, you expect long, in-depth information, and it is up to you to pick what you need. Now, compare WikiGuide to a friend, or a Guide to North American Birds. You ask your friend (look up) something you wish to know about. You do not expect an encyclopedic answer. You expect a decent explanation, and maybe a reference to a book of some sort (i.e. Wikipedia) for more detail.

How Entries can be written, as opposed to Wikipedia's articles

(A quick note — WikiGuide would prefer to call articles 'entries'. But whatever floats your boat.)

Following is a list of how entries can be formatted.

Tasteful Humor

The articles can allow for some tasteful humor (this means nothing that can offend any race, religion, social/political status, age, gender, or other "categorization" of people.). You should also avoid too much humour, or else the entry may be removed on the grounds that you don't know where the information is, if there is any. Good examples are:

Super Mario Bros. is a game developed for the Nintendo Entertainment System by Nintendo EAD. It can be considered the polar opposite of E.T. for the Atari 2600; Where E.T. destroyed the video game industry (Atari was so ashamed afterwards they buried it in the deserts of the south-western US), Super Mario Bros. single-handedly gave you everything up to games like Call of Duty and Modern Warfare.

Wood is a fibrous material from trees that was harvested, way back when metal didn't exist, for the creation of various items not requiring electricity. In recent years, several woodland creatures have banded together to stop the harvesting of wood. Needless to say, it's not working.

Things of this nature. Humorous analogies tend to work nicely in a pinch.

Most Reliable Source

(Preemptive apologies if you are confused by terminology used to describe the example. I did my best)

I will provide a Wikipedia page for the purposes of demonstrating this point: Wikipedia's article on the game Super Mario World (the actual point of discussion is about Super Mario World ROM hacking, if you wish to skip ahead). The point here is the ROM hacking (referred to on those pages as fan hacking) is not considered "valid" material for Wikipedia, most likely on the grounds that there aren't reliable sources (A search for Lunar Magic on Wikipedia will redirect to Super Mario World. The Lunar Magic page was deleted for the same reason, about)

In the scope of our planet Earth, there aren't any reliable sources for Super Mario World ROM hacking. In the scope of the ROM hacking world, however, there are plenty of reliable sources, similar to how ESPN is a reliable source for sports. Why should ESPN be considered reliable in general (when it's really only concerning sports) but not romhacking.net?

The answer is in accepting the most reliable source of information for the topic. This means that, in whatever subject, the most reliable source of information for that subject is used. However, this does not mean you can write whatever and claim the source you used is the "most reliable". If the source is challenged, proof must be given that is, in fact, the most reliable source.

Avoid squishing a bunch of related things into one article

See Recurring Enemies in The Legend of Zelda series. If you were to try and search for octorok, you get redirected to this list of enemies in the Legend of Zelda series. This is fine, (and expected of an encyclopedia), but most (if not all) of the sections on this page are a paragraph long. This cannot give you enough information about the enemies as it pertains to the game.

The solution would be to do away with this list, instead making it a category. Then, putting each enemy as its own page. You're probably thinking "what a waste of space! A bunch of entries only a paragraph long!". They're still stubs. They can still be removed. The point here is that you are able to write more about the subject if it is its own separate page. (Trying to separate that list in Wikipedia would most likely get you in trouble)

Miscellaneous

• The proposed name of the wiki (WikiGuide) is inspired by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and designed to work like The Guide.
• Stubs still exist, despite all other indicators of how WikiGuide may work. They are treated in the same way as on any other WikiMedia site.
• Anyone who is a real graphics designer who can create a more wikimedia-ish logo, be my guest.
• If you have a good slogan, share it! The best I can come up with is "WikiGuide: A free Guide to Life, the Universe, and Everything" (most likely shorter than that, though.)

About the Project

Proposed by

Rnddim 05:46, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

Alternative names

• InfoWiki

Related projects/proposals

One that is almost like this is WikiBrain, but please don't consider this and WikiBrain as proposing the same thing. They most certainly don't. They are much much different.

Domain names

• www.wikiguide.org
• www.infowiki.org (if the alternate name is chosen)

People interested

1. Rnddim of course!