Forum:Why WP articles are a good base for us to build on

Forums: Index > Watercooler > Why WP articles are a good base for us to build on

• Psychology wikia copied a ton of WP articles but labelled them as requiring enhancement to become a valuable and reliable source of information for psychologist professionals. Some might think that copying WP articles is needless busy work-after all contributors can simply jump to wp for that sort of information. The answer to this is psychology is not mirroring- they are mutating the WP articles to conform to their site's identity. And their contributors would much rather contribute on Psychology wikia precisely because it is not WP.

• Which leads us to the question we could ask ourselves. Why would someone find it more interesting to write an article on a place here on our local history site and not on WP?

• WP articles for places have a lot of good information in them. For example, on Greene County, Ohio, there is a Geography fast facts thing which orients the user with maps. There is a timeline that gives the relative population. There is a bunch of demographic info that gives an idea of some of the characteristics of the locality.

But after reading this article do you have a feeling of what the place is really like? Nevermind what it was like for your relative to live there 100 years ago. Do you have any idea what it is like to live there today? What do most of the people do? Is there any dominant characteristic industries that employ significant numbers of people? Were there any newsworthy events during the particular period?

• If we want to be about family history as much as we are about statisticts about birth/death/marriage dates, then this sort of framework of time and place sets the stage for readers to grasp what their relatives lives were like. We really need to convey a slice of life in each of these localities.

• The header in the Greene county article matches sidebars seen at other family history sites. I am proposing that WP articles be moved over into the sort of framework given for this article. The various tabular information available in the navbox above can be culled by Bot from other genealogy sites. Tabular data is not copyrightable, so this will further help us quickly bootstrap ourselves up to a place where we have a better shot at competing for the attention of amateur local historians & family history contributors.

~ Phlox 09:44, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

I couldn't have put it better myself. Way to go! (But this forum needs a better name) Robin Patterson 23:44, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

I also agree. -AMK152^{(Talk • Contributions} 04:21, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Oh very well. My point with the evocative language is that we can't be wall flowers or apologetic about the fact that we are very different from WP- We need to be very clear about the fact we are not mirroring WP content- That copying wp pages provides only a starting point and is only a minimally acceptable family history articles. Plus, it has the advantage that folks actually respond to forum notes. heh heh. ~ Phlox 07:03, 11 November 2007 (UTC)