Inclupedia

Inclupedia is an upcoming wiki that will be a combination mirror and supplement of Wikipedia. Its purpose will be to serve as an encyclopedia taking advantage of the content already existing on Wikipedia while also including verifiable content deemed too non-notable for inclusion on Wikipedia. Two types of pages will exist on Inclupedia:

1. Pages that exist on Wikipedia, and whose complete and up-to-date revision histories are mirrored on Inclupedia using IncluMirrorBot.
2. Pages that were deleted from Wikipedia for notability reasons, or have been created from scratch on Inclupedia by Inclupedia users.

Pages of the second kind can be freely edited from Inclupedia. Clicking the "Edit" tab on pages of the first kind will take the user to the appropriate edit screen on Wikipedia.

Inclupedia will depend upon constant API queries to obtain the text of recent revisions. This should not put any heavier of a burden on the servers than any of Wikipedia's antivandal bots. In fact, it could even relieve some of the burden by providing another wiki that people can query for Wikipedia content. And the burden imposed by IncluMirrorBot might be completely eliminated when bug 17450 is fixed and an XML feed of the text of recent revisions is available.

Other wikis

Articles from wikiquote and so on will be integrated as quotes related to Napoleon Bonaparte, definition of yogurt, etc.

Comparison to existing wikis

Inclupedia, as compared to existing wikis

Wiki	Notability requirement	Verifiability requirement	Neutral point of view requirement	Editable wiki	Integrated with Wikipedia	Encyclopedia format	WMF- affiliated
Wikipedia	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Inclupedia	No	Somewhat	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Wikibooks	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Somewhat	No	Yes
Wikinfo	No	Somewhat	No	Yes	No	Yes	No
Wikia	No	Depends	Depends	Yes	No	Depends	No
Deletionpedia	No	No	No	No	Somewhat	Yes	No

Article life cycle

An article life-cycle that could work, for example, like this. Notice that article control passes back and forth between Wikipedia and Inclupedia as articles are created and deleted from Wikipedia.

• Article Dogs belonging to John Smith is created on Wikipedia (and therefore created on Inclupedia automatically; if existent on Inclupedia already, then on Inclupedia, the new revisions are simply dumped on top of the existing revisions. This article now comes under Wikipedia control.)
• Article Dogs belonging to John Smith is edited twice on Wikipedia, and these two revisions are mirrored in the revision history for that article on Inclupedia.
• Article Dogs belonging to John Smith is deleted from Wikipedia, but remains on Inclupedia. The deleting sysop marks it as verifiable (due to newspaper accounts of Smith's dogs rescuing a 73-year-old retiree from an apartment fire back in 2003), but non-notable per w:WP:1E. Article control now passes to Inclupedia.
• Edits are made to Inclupedia article Dogs belonging to John Smith. No changes occur at Wikipedia, because the article doesn't exist there.
• Article Dogs belonging to John Smith is recreated from scratch at Wikipedia. These edits are added to the top of the Inclupedia revision history, and article control returns to Wikipedia.
• Article Dogs belonging to John Smith is deleted from Wikipedia again, with similar deleting sysop remarks as last time; control returns to Inclupedia.
• Article Foofy (dog belonging to John Smith) is created on Wikipedia, and therefore also automatically created on Inclupedia.
• Article Foofy (dog belonging to John Smith) is moved to Dogs belonging to John Smith on Wikipedia. All the revisions in Foofy (dog belonging to John Smith) are merged into the revision history of Dogs belonging to John Smith on Inclupedia.
• Article Dogs belonging to John Smith is moved to Hounds belonging to John Smith on Wikipedia. All the revisions in the revision history of Dogs belonging to John Smith on Wikipedia are moved to Hounds belonging to John Smith on Inclupedia. The revisions that were in the revision history of Dogs belonging to John Smith on Inclupedia before the Wikipedia article Foofy (dog belonging to John Smith) was moved there and its revision history was merged into it remain there and are not moved. This type of situation is partly why there will be a mirror_revision table to keep track of which revisions are mirrored from Wikipedia.

FAQ

General Questions

• Why do you need to mirror Wikipedia?
  • Because it's necessary in order to integrate with Wikipedia reasonably seamlessly. The wikisphere is littered with wikis like Wikinfo that failed because they didn't adequately integrate with Wikipedia. Here are some areas in which mirror-based integration would be helpful:
    • Categories. If you have Category:Dogs on Inclupedia, that category is not as useful if its only members are Inclupedia articles, e.g. Foofie (dog belonging to John Smith). You want it to also include Dog grooming, history of dogs, and all the other topics in that category on Wikipedia. You want the Inclupedia categories to fit into the larger Wikipedia categorization scheme.
    • Page existence detection. Red/blue existence-detecting wikilinks are also facilitated by the Wikipedia mirror; if your article says "Foofie is a dog," you want dog to be a blue link to the Wikipedia article if such article exists, or you want it to be red if there is no such article either on Inclupedia or Wikipedia.
    • Templates. It is useful to be able to transclude templates directly from Wikipedia, without having to constantly have an authorized user import them as they are updated.
• OK, but why does the Wikipedia mirror have to be up-to-date at all times?
  • Ideally, Inclupedia editors should never need to edit Wikipedia directly again; they should be able to make all the edits they need to make through Inclupedia. And to do that, it's imperative that the Wikipedia mirror be absolutely up to date. Also, the mirror is where the revisions of articles deleted from Wikipedia are collected from; if it's not up to date, some revisions will be missing. Lastly, integrated watchlists won't be of much use unless the recent changes table is kept up to date with data about Wikipedia article revisions.
• Won't it be a pretty daunting workload for sysops to sort through those deleted articles?
  • Most deleted articles probably won't have a host of references for sysops to check the verifiability of, which is probably why they were deleted to begin with. But, there are also many tricks of the trade that can be employed. The deleting sysop may have left behind some remarks, or there may be pertinent PROD or CSD template remarks, or AFD or talk page discussions, that can provide insight into verifiability issues. Sysops may create whitelists and blacklists of contributors to help them identify articles that may be in need of heightened scrutiny. Perhaps some tools such as w:User:CorenSearchBot can also be of use in spotting copyvios. All in all, though, the issues of legal liability are probably overblown. It costs $350 to sue in federal court; how many people will care enough to do that? And people typically have to go through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act processes first anyway. Let's not be deliberately indifferent to legal issues, but let's not be paranoid either.
• How will page moves work?
  • The general rule is that when a user moves a page on Wikipedia, all the revisions under Wikipedia's control move. All the Inclupedia-only revisions stay put, although they may be buried under a redirect.

Policy Questions

• Does Inclupedia plan on mirroring content which was deleted due to it containing non-free copyrighted content? What about articles deleted due to "attack" content?
  • Illegal content such as copyvios has to be deleted wherever it appears, because otherwise the government is likely to impose civil and/or criminal penalties.
• What is the plan for handling non-CSD deletions like en:WP:PROD and en:WP:AFD, where the deletion reasons are not always clear?
  • Usually some sort of reason is provided in PRODs and AFDs. But Inclupedia can make its own judgments as to whether an article contains verifiable content not adequately covered elsewhere; if the article contains nothing salvageable, then it should and will remain deleted from Inclupedia too. Since PROD and AFD are not supposed to be used for getting rid of illegal content, that should not be a cause for concern in reference to articles deleted through those processes.
• What is the position of Inclupedia on Biographies of Living Persons when that person is non-notable and does not want an article?
  • Information that is verifiable by cited reliable sources, and not prohibited by law from being posted, should remain. As for less reliable sources, we must disclose the reliability, or lack thereof, of those sources. Depending on what's required by law, we may have to do more than that.
• What if there is an article that, while verifiable by reliable sources, is about a subject about which so little is known that the article cannot grow beyond one or two sentences?
  • It should probably be merged into a larger article.
• Should the default be to delete articles and revisions from Inclupedia when they are deleted from Wikipedia, and let an Inclupedia sysop resurrect them if he sees fit? Or should the default be to not delete articles and revisions from Inclupedia unless the deleting sysop as Wikipedia has specifically checked the box to do so?
  • If we want to satisfy people's concerns about potential backlogs of harmful/illegal content waiting to be deleted from Inclupedia, we should probably set it to delete it from Inclupedia by default, and let the deleting sysop at Wikipedia check a box to not delete it from Inclupedia, if he deems it to be deletable only by reason of non-notability. But I'd prefer to lean toward keeping content as a default; it should be innocent till proven guilty.
• Who will be sysops at Inclupedia?
  • Whoever wants the job and hasn't given indications that they would be a poor sysop. Actually, we aim to create a hierarchy of guardians (aka sysops), lieutenants, captains, and so on, which should allow for more sysops and even bureaucrat-equivalents to be created, because there will be a lot of higher-ranking officers to keep them in check.
• Will Inclupedians have power to view and undelete articles that were deleted from Wikipedia?
  • Yup, to the extent we were able to get hold of those revisions before the pages were deleted.

Technical Questions

• What changes, exactly, are needed in order to create this project
  • We need a means of:
    • Mirroring changes to Wikipedia on Inclupedia;
    • Handling page title collisions gracefully, by merging page histories, moving pages around, etc. as may be warranted by the situation. It shouldn't be too hard; we can just have an "undo" option for unmerging page histories.
    • Either locking down mirrored Wikipedia pages from editing on Inclupedia, or causing edits to those pages to be replicated on Wikipedia;
• Is there a similar project like this already, and if so, why would we want to duplicate its efforts?
  • There does not seem to be. A few sites, such as Answers.com, share a few commonalities in that they are mirror/supplements of Wikipedia, but they are not editable wikis.
• How does Inclupedia manage oversight actions, and will these be automatically mirrored to Inclupedia?
  • Yes, they should automatically be mirrored, just like edits, page moves, etc. Although we'll scrutinize to make those oversight actions are legit.
• What happens if the deleted content is recreated on Wikipedia or alternative pages are created for that content? How do you plan for the software to recognize deleted cut-and-paste-move fixes?
  • Although it's not strictly kosher, it is fairly common on Wikipedia for content from two pages to be merged, and one redirected to the other, without merging the page histories. Thus, suppose that John Smith is created on Wikipedia and deleted, but remains on Inclupedia. Then John Q. Smith is created on Wikipedia with cut-and-pasted content from Inclupedia's John Smith. If John Q. Smith remains at Wikipedia, Inclupedia's John Smith will be redirected there. If John Q. Smith is deleted from Wikipedia, then it will probably end up being either deleted from Inclupedia or, if a redirect would be useful, redirected to John Smith. In some cases, it might be appropriate to transwiki revisions from Inclupedia to Wikipedia, when copy and pastes have been done, or perhaps some other way can be found of noting in the revision history or in the article itself that some content was taken from the Inclupedia article on John Smith.
• Who is responsible for maintenance of the software fork for the changes required for this project? Have they agreed to manage another large project like this?
  • At first, it's going to be me, Nathan Larson, creating a minimum viable product by necessity, due to the limitations of my time, programming skills, and other resources.
• Do you plan on giving Wikipedia administrators a "do not include in Inclupedia" checkbox for the deletion page?
  • That's up to WMF to decide. Perhaps deleting sysops at Wikipedia could even have three options: Yes, the article is acceptable for Inclupedia; No, it isn't; or Unsure/Questionable/Maybe/You guys will have figure it out because I'm too busy to sort this stuff for you.
• How would Wikipedia accounts be linked to Inclupedia accounts?
  • Users would apply to create an account at Inclupedia and receive a passcode. They would then make an edit, from their Meta-Wiki account, at metawikipedia:User talk:Inclumedia containing that passcode. Or they could have User:Inclumedia use Special:EmailUser (or its API equivalent) to send them an email with the passcode. There are ways.
• What if Wikipedia has a page with content that Inclupedia finds objectionable or insufficient? E.g., suppose it doesn't link to pertinent Inclupedia articles on the subject.
  • There will be an Override: namespace that allows Wikipedia content to be overridden. A predecessor to the proposed Override extension is mw:Extension:FrontBackMatterForcedWikilinks, which gives a bit of an idea what type of functionality is envisaged.

Userbox

{{User:UBX/Inclupedia}}

I	This user supports the creation of Inclupedia.

See also

• Inclupedia/Supporters — Sign up as an interested person
• Inclupedia/Proposal — The same plan, with different phraseology
• Inclupedia/Types of hosted articles
• Inclupedia/Development log — Day-by-day progress reports