We already have several rivals, including the Chinese, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_Baike and the largest online encyclopaedia Hudong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudong At some point in the near future translation software will improve to the point that they can compete against us in languages other than Chinese. Also I suspect we are already losing ground to more inclusionist projects such as IMDB.
We will still have a niche in languages they aren't interested in, and among people who care about copyright. But my suspicion is that we are unusual, and that most potential editors are more annoyed by having their contributions rejected by deletionists than by something in the small print that says their words now belong to the website they've written them on. Willingness to adapt to the desires of National Governments and even cultural prejudices also creates niches in much if not most of the world. I've no idea how good Chinese to Arabic translation software is, but the combination of an adequate translation and a filter agreed with relevant governments or religions would probably beat us in the Arab world. I don't like the idea of political censorship, but I do like the idea of enabling people to make their own choices as to what they see. If our user preferences included two stick figures and a sliding bar that enabled every option from burka to thongless then my personal choice need not concern others any more than theirs mattered to me. Other interesting niches would be for a "child safe", unscientific or mono-dialect encyclopaedias. I'm not convinced that the young earth creationists with their American English at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia or the Australian English equivalent at http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/Main_Page are sufficiently mainstream to do this, let alone the absolutist flat earthers at http://conservapedia.wikkii.com/wiki/Main_Page But I suspect that a mainstream trusted brand could find a niche here, perhaps even with a bowdlerised mirror of Wikipedia. I've seen many newbies get an early warning by starting their wiki career "correcting" articles to the version of English that they are comfortable with, and I'd like to see us resolve this by making display dialect a user preference http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:More_multi_dialect_wikis I think this would have a secondary benefit that identifying and appropriately marking ambiguous words such as bonnet, hood and fender would make it easier to translate those articles into other languages. Other options would be for a site that ended the inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea pigs. WereSpielChequers _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l