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Talk:Scratchpad

Wikia - creating communities

[edit] Proposed WikiCities & WikiCities incubator

Starting a Wikicity requires a fair amount of effort. Perhaps this page and the main namespace could be used as an "incubator" until a decision is made to start a real Wikicity.

I agree with this idea. It might be a good way to check there is interest in a project before risking creating it and finding out it doesn't go anywhere. Angela 06:25, 26 Dec 2004 (PST)

To prevent this list from becoming unneccessarily polluted, projects can also be moved to the incubator (scratchpad) wikicity. One criteria for when a topic is ready to move off to its own wikicity is when there starts to be namespace collisions in the main Wikicity namespace (or incubator namespace); but that would be a nice problem to solve. (suggested by Samw, implemented by Angela)

In that spirit, here are some proposed Wikia:

  • Business plans - Some business plans are suited for collaborative development if there are no proprietary technologies or processes, or if it is a non-profit business
  • Sheet music - Melodies and words of many classic tunes are in the public domain but sheet music in contemporary notation is typically still copyrighted. This Wikicity will allow the collaborative development of an open source version in standard format, such as LilyPond[1] or MusicXML[2].
  • Legal documents - Develop open source versions of common legal documents (on a per jurisdiction basis as needed): wills, rental agreements, power of attorney, etc.
  • Political advocacy - Collaboratively draft specific petitions and proposals.
  • Consumer products - Collaboratively write specifications for consumer products that don't exist today. This might spark a business plan.
  • Street Newspaper Newsfeed - Street newspapers[4] are printed by social activists to give to low income and homeless people to sell so that they have meaningful work. This means rather than straight panhandling, they have a product to sell. People who wouldn't otherwise give to panhandlers might "purchase" such newspapers. Right now the content of these newspapers is sporadic. This Wikicity would develop collaborative and open source content that could be re-used locally, nationally and around the world.
    • Interesting...but potentially a bad idea for two reasons. First of all, I thought that street papers generally reported mostly on local matters (I could be wrong). If that's the case, why do they need a newsfeed? Wouldn't that just homogenize them? Second, and more worrisome to me, I tend to think that if a street newsfeed were free and the source of a lot of street-paper content, there would be a certain percentage of readers who, instead of buying the street papers, would simply read the articles off the newsfeed. That would deprive income from the homeless people who sell the papers, thereby depriving the papers of their primary raison d'être. --Marnen 20:57, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)
  • Stock photos - Stock photography[5] banks images for future use by any group. The Wikimedia Commons[6] is a good start but it is not organized for people seeking arbitrary images and photos. This Wikicity would use Wikimedia Commons as the repository but cross index everything and actively encourage requests and submissions for stock photos.—Samw 02:50, 29 Dec 2004
  • Khusrau – Collecting genealogies, sufi initiation chains and other historical information of non-encyclopedic interest. See [7] and the prototype at [8].—iFaqeer (Talk to me!) 16:05, 29 Dec 2004 (PST)

[edit] Errors

Has the scratchpad been temporarily shutdown? I'm getting a "not found" / 404 error. -CocoaZen 05:19, 3 Feb 2005 (PST)

WORKSFORME edit: found the bug, for some reason I clicked on an intrawiki link and i got the 404, that's becase its using /wiki/title instead of /index.php/title , replace wiki with index.php and you'll do fine. --Me at work 06:02, 3 Feb 2005 (PST)
It hasn't been shut down. It's just a bug related to the rewrite rules that were applied yesterday. bug 69. Angela 06:26, 3 Feb 2005 (PST)
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