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| - Apologies for posting here, but I didn't want to register for the board also. As a former Trekkie I think this project is a great idea and you've done lots of good work in the setup (I like it when projects go live only when they're ready). Some general comments in case you are interested: 1) The background image is a bit unnerving. I recommend a single color background for the content area. 2) Are you sure you want to use the FDL? On Wikipedia, we've often regretted this decision. It's extremely complicated and quite restrictive. For example, to legally use images that are commercially relevant (which applies to most Trek stuff) you need permission to distribute them under the FDL, which most people won't agree with. My personal recommendation would be to use a footer like "All content is in the public domain except where noted otherwise." Then you could add notices like "Copyright Paramount Pictures, used with permission" to images. Your footer notice "solely intended for non-profit purposes" is problematic: The GFDL explicitly allows commercial use. The public domain has advantages over other copyleft licenses like Creative Commons in that it is fully compatible with the FDL -- you could move content over from MA to Wikipedia. You could also do it vice versa but would then have to add an FDL notice to the individual pages which are copied from Wikipedia. You have to do this anyway (the FDL requires you to give attribution), so you don't lose much. Of course, if you must have the copyleft effect the PD is not an option. But it will be very difficult if not impossible to change to a different license later on, so you should be aware of the options.. 3) I strongly recommend developing a deletion policy like "Wikipedia:Votes for deletion" on WP where pages that are to be deleted are listed, and if there's consensus among regulars that the page should be removed it is done by an admin after a certain period of days. If you have such a policy in place it's a good idea to give all trusted regulars admin status (everything an admin can do can be reverted except for image deletion). Without it, that might be dangerous and lead to deletion/undeletion wars and alienation of users. 4) I heard about this project because I have a Google news alert on "Wikipedia", and it was referred to on some site as "a new Wikipedia". Even on the MB this terminology is used. I personally don't care much, but there are some Wikipedians who get very pissed when the term is used in a non-Wikipedia context. That's because they want Wikipedia to become a trademark, and to prevent its abuse (there are quite a few sites that copy Wikipedia content and slap advertising on it -- if they can also copy the name that might be a problem). This becomes almost impossible if Wikipedia becomes a generic term like "wiki", because such terms cannot be protected. In general it should be sufficient to just refer to the site as a "wiki" and not a "wikipedia". 5) You might want to think now about multi language support. MediaWiki is translated to practically every language, but it requires separate databases (and settings files) for each. On OpenFacts (a MediaWiki I run) I've hacked the codebase to at least use one account database for all wikis, that is reasonably easy to do and should be done before you setup other languages (to avoid the current Wikipedia situation). Of course any code changes make updates slightly more difficult, which brings me to .. 6) I have no idea who's behind this site, but I hope that whoever is has also subscribed to the wikitech-l mailing list for MediaWiki development. If you make any useful modifications to the codebase, we would very much appreciate it to hear about them. That's it for now, I might think of other issues later. I probably won't be able to hang around here much, but I will check up on the latest ENT episodes. Collaborative review writing could be fun.--Eloquence 20:35, 22 Dec 2003 (PST)
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