User:GreenReaper/WikiFur - A home for the furry community


 * ''I posted this manifesto 4 August 2005 on Wikipedia:Talk:Furry fandom, about a week after founding WikiFur. It generated a certain amount of interest, but nowhere near the level prompted by my later article, WikiFur: By and for the furry community. Wikipedia's article about The Blind Pig was deleted, albeit over a year later.

WikiFur - a home for the furry community
I would like to make a proposal. But first, I would like to tell you a story. Bear with me! :-)


 * --GreenReaper 05:00, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

Why Wikipedia is not perfect for us
One day, not so long ago, I was writing a page about the Blind Pig. It's a fun series of stories about a future where anthropomorphic mutations are common. There have been quite a few stories in the series; some of you may even be familiar with it. That's the trouble, though — some of you probably do know about it, but the vast majority of people don't. Moreover, it is hard to say whether they would ever want to.

I was worrying, even as I wrote it, "will this really be deemed encyclopedia material?", as in my heart I knew that it was on the borderline. There are many things that I have never written about on Wikipedia, as they go far beyond that border. But I couldn't get rid of the thought they deserve writing about somewhere.

So I decided to make that somewhere. Here it is. It's not much, now — although I have spent some time writing some pages — but I believe it can grow. Why? Because I've seen it happen.

It worked last time!
Consider the Creatures Wiki. Founded at the start of this year, it started small, but has since grown to over 2000 pages, and over 230,000 words - enough to fill three good-sized novels. It turned out that there was a lot to be said about a game series which had maybe five pages and a few stubs on Wikipedia, made by a company that went bust two years ago.

More importantly, it was a lot more than could ever have been said on Wikipedia. Take, for example, the infamous Tortured Norns, the cheese page, or perhaps the Creatures 2 genome, a topic of great importance to the Creatures community, but with virtually zero relevance to anyone else. It would have been argued over, and eventually deleted, or relegated to a small section in the main Creatures 2 article. Not one-tenth of the pages linked to from the Creatures history page would be deemed worthy of a page on Wikipedia, for all that they are of interest to the Creatures community.

The proposal
I therefore propose that, since the furry pages here are never likely to reach their true potential, and since there is obviously a wish to expand them, that they be copied or recreated on WikiFur, and expanded to other topics from there. I think that the existing articles on Wikipedia are useful, and relevant (the fact that they have survived until now is sufficient proof of that) but I also think that a wikicity is a better place for in-depth development of furry topics than here. Then, once there is an active body of good pages about the community there, it will be acceptable to put links to them in the appropriate pages here, so people can go to WikiFur for more information.

About Wikicities
Some explanation is probably required: Wikicities is a collection of MediaWikis like Wikipedia, only intended for community works that don't fit best on Wikipedia, but which are crying out for the wiki concept. The sites are licensed under the GFDL (so can use Wikipedia content, and vice versa) and are run and hosted by the same people who do Wikipedia, although they wear different hats, working for Wikia rather than the WikiMedia Foundation. Angela Beesley, recently re-elected as a WikiMedia Trustee by a landslide, is the main coordinator. See this article in the Wall Street Journal.

The best Wikicities so far — Creatures, Star Wars, Doom and the like — have all had established communities who were just waiting for a place to express themselves in the wiki way. I think WikiFur can be that place for the furry community.

Call to action
Now we come to the bit where I ask you to help out. I know I can't do what I did for the Creatures Wiki again. The furry community is too big, and I am now too busy to spend many hours each day researching and writing pages. But I'm pretty sure there are those of you who have the knowledge and could devote the effort to helping make the best, freely-editable furry resource on the web.

As they say, it requires only the will to do so. . . so won't you come along for the ride? I'm sure it'll be a blast. :-)