I'm working with Dr. Kiff to make computer-related articles relevant to psychology, and I was going to tackle content copied directly from Wikipedia. However, this is a huge rewriting task which I wouldn't expect of someone intimately familiar with the involved topics (which, for the most part, I'm not), and indeed most of those articles are completely unchanged except for the stripping of redlinks. Therefore, I propose (yes, as a foreigner) that you
- Completely strip these articles of irrelevant content except the most basic pieces (like the definition). This will go a long way to relieve your current writer's block.
- Expand them based on both personal knowledge and outside sources (of which Wikipedia is a great repository), perhaps even with ideas taken from Wikipedia. But this expansion should be strictly psychological, or building up to psychological conclusions.
- Delete all articles which have no psychological content (but permit their re-creation).
- Apply this section to the remaining articles as a preventative measure against creating irrelevant articles. This also serves as a favor to both your users and the other wikis, because they want to find each other.
- Perpetually repeat these steps.
I would be happy to further discuss my reasoning behind these recommendations. Note that I don't constrain their scope to computer-related articles.
As a side note, I would appreciate any feedback on Wikia:Interwiki Integration, which I linked to above. A friend told me the language is intimidating and a bit confusing, and the contract's stiffness (i.e., you're in or you're not) unappealing. Second (and third, fourth...) opinions are always good, so please give yours. This forum probably isn't the best place to discuss this, so I further invite you to the dedicated talk page. --Jesdisciple (talk) 16:05, 25 November 2008 (UTC)
- Hi, I'm one of the admins on the programming wiki. Unless this wiki is unhappy with their wikipedia source articles I don't think we should ask them to do complete rewrites. It's an unfair demand to put on them. I had been hoping that some of your comp sci related articles could be copied over to the programming wiki as pages we could improve on. However most of them seem to be sourced from wikipedia and I'm wary of turning the programming wiki into a wikipedia clone. What we could do is place soft redirects for pages that we have but that don't exist on your wiki. Then if you want to those can be replaced at some later stage. --Drawde83 23:13, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
- I think that would be a good solution/start. Dr. Becker-Weidman Talk 00:11, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
- My point seems to have been completely missed. First, I was inviting discussion on the issue - not intending to demand anything. Second, I think the harsher alternative is to rewrite a complete article one step at a time. With a blank slate, you can start discussing a topic from any perspective; if you're restricted to another wiki's outline, new content is produced much more slowly - and with no compensating benefit, because the content you're editing is already available somewhere else. --Jesdisciple (talk) 00:27, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
- ok that is a fair point. You did state that it was a proposal. Could you point out some irrelevant content?
- Are you suggesting pages that mention programming (I realise it's broader than that) get those parts edited out? --Drawde83 10:29, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
- The best way to view much of the Wikipedia articles copied over here is to see them as placeholders. If they are useful keep what makes sense but feel free to completely rewrite if that is necessary. They are mainly there to show what links are available and to give people at least some information until they can be upgraded. The main thing to keep is the see also links as they follow the structure of the APA thesaurus we are following. I think the thing to do is to get underway and make progress on two or three pages and we can see how it pans out.Dr Joe Kiff 17:20, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
- I don't think editing by committee is really going to help out both wikis. It's forcing you guys to work on articles that are not your main interest. I don't really have the time to edit two different wikis. It seems much more labour intensive than this needs to be.
- I think trying it out is a reasonable idea but I'm not going to commit to it.--Drawde83 21:06, 28 November 2008 (UTC)
- To clarify, I don't expect them to replace placeholders any sooner than they would if we weren't here. And I will not be adding any content, because this isn't my field (and I have no need for a new one). I'm more interested developing the community of wikis than this wiki, so I'm viewing each wiki like its members might view a single article. --Jesdisciple (talk) 21:57, 28 November 2008 (UTC)