OpenTutorial:Wikipedia

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Wikipedia is the large, open encyclopedia project. This is actually a complex of related projects in different languages. People who speak of "Wikipedia" or "WP" ofter refer to the English-language project; others refer loosely to the entire effort, including sister projects such as Wikibooks and Wiktionary.

The wiki engine that operates OpenTutorial, MediaWiki, was developed especially to run Wikipedia and its sister projects. Therefore editing techniques that work there will usually work here and vice versa. There are some concerns.


Technical Concerns

The exact version of the MediaWiki engine running at any time may not be the same on both wikis. You can check the version installed here by going to Special:Version and a similar link will discover the version installed on other wikis. Regardless of version number, Wikipedia's installation generally seems to run new and experimental hacks, tweaks, and gimmicks on top of the official distribution.

At the moment, OT does not allow the construction of equations using the <math> (LaTeX) syntax. Also, OT does not run the ParserFunctions extension.

Many features found on WP depend on a large inventory of templates. This is only a problem for the experienced editor who reflexively uses these tools. Most of them can be duplicated here and some already are.

Interwiki linking to Wikipedia does not work at present.

Do not copy images directly from WP articles to OT. These are generally not the original images but only thumbnails of inferior quality. Instead, download the original, high-resolution version found on the image description page. (Also, there are legal concerns; see next.) Images with names such as "400px-Foo.jpg" are copied thumbnails and will be deleted on sight.

Legal Concerns

There is generally no need to duplicate material from WP or Wikibooks here on OT. We have different missions. However editors are encouraged to bolster their tutorials here by references to other sources; WP and its sister projects are among these. Merely citing the source does not create any legal concerns.

Sometimes, an editor may think it wise, particularly in the case of images, to copy materials from WP. Please use caution.

All materials uploaded to OT must be available under a free license; we offer in turn all our content under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.5 license. Wikipedia offers its content, generally, under the GNU Public Documentation License. The solution to reuse of WP content is usually to tag it with {{gfdl}}.

However, note well that much content on Wikipedia is not freely licensed. This should be avoided here. Before uploading a WP image to OT, check its image description page by clicking on the image itself. See the text of the current license to ensure it is compatible with ours. (You will want to go to this page anyway, to ensure you are getting the full-size original image.)

All material on Wikimedia Commons, without exception, is either freely licensed or in the public domain. The same is true for Wikisource, which contains primary source texts.

Arguments based on the doctrine of free use which prevail on WP will generally fail here.

Social Concerns

For experienced WP editors, an attraction of OT is the technical ease of editing; the markup is nearly identical. But please do not fall into the trap of automatically carrying social habits from one project to another. OpenTutorial is an independent project with its own community and social rules.

The general atmosphere on WP tends to be confrontational and hostile, with much jockeying for political high ground, insistence on process, instruction creep, and wikilawering. There is no need for most of this; it stems from an inability or unwillingness among the oldest members of the community to impose formal structure, coupled with WP's explosive growth.

OT is even more lacking in formal structure, but our community is also much smaller. In particular, we do not have the vast ad hoc bureaucracy of WP. There is no need to approach concerns in a legalistic, confrontational manner. Simply bring them to the attention of involved editors on their talk pages. If you have interpersonal difficulties, leave a message on the talk page of an OT admin [1]. Be nice.

Users attempting to import social habits from WP may find their contributions unwelcome. Thank you.

External links

Retrieved from "https://opentutorial.com/index.php?title=OpenTutorial:Wikipedia&oldid=2528"