Forum:Discussion on using Wikipedia Content

Before things on Merger with the Wikia Anime Project are finished, position towards Wikipedia content should be discussed.

The general idea is that the Wikia Anime Project lists Anime in it's listing (Plans also are to expand into Manga, Cartoons, and Comics in the future. Which would mean those Wikia come into the project to) and it uses other Wikia such as the Narutopedia and InuYasha Wiki to give full information on the larger things, while using the Animepedia to give full information on the Anime series for smaller ones (Manga, Cartoons, and Comics would do the same for each of their areas). This means that any content for a larger topic with it's own wiki should be put in that Wiki instead of in the main wiki. But that also means that a wiki can't become part of the project unless it's going to exclude information which the project would use. The basic relevance to this is that Wikipedia has a good starting on the generic information, but it doesn't go into full detail because it's a generic encyclopedia instead of a specialized one. But the underlying thing is that if you don't use what wikia has already made it's been shown that articles end up missing information which is in the Wikipedia articles.

I'm not saying that Stuff here should be overridden with things from Wikipedia. I'm saying that what wikipedia has should be merged with what we have here (Yes it can be done without removing all the work done here). The basic tecnique is to Protect an article, Create a /Wikipedia Subpage with the contents of the Wikipedia article (Stating with the Wikipedia template which will be here if the Wiki joins the project), and the content is moved to a /Original Subpage (Of course a copy of the pagecontents of that will be placed at the original location as a dummy for readers to see). After that, A /Draft Subpage is created and sections from the /Original and /Wikipedia pages are cut out and placed into the Draft until all the information has been merged, and the Wikipedia and Original pages have nothing but duplicated information left on them. After that /Draft is moved over top of the dummy article and anything protected is unprotected and the /Wikipedia article which is leftover is protected to preserve the history (History has to be preserved to comply with the GFDL).

In cases like this it's good to remember the old quote: "“Don't reinvent the wheel unless it needs reinventing.”" Which basically means that if someone already has information which you are allowed to use, don't stress yourself doing all that over again. Instead use what's already made, then make it better. ~Dantman(talk) Mar 27, 2007 @ 00:13 (UTC)