WikiFur starts 2000th article
This Sunday WikiFur - the furry encyclopedia - celebrated the creation of its 2000th article. Founded on 24 July, WikiFur has quickly become one of the most comprehensive sites for furry information on the net, with over 350,000 words of content. More than 23,000 edits have been made since its inception. It remains freely editable by all.
In the last three months, over 150 contributors from around the world have come together to write about their fandom. Guided by the principles of neutral writing set down by Wikipedia, they have created a website that even those critical of the fandom can respect:
"I first cringed at the thought of a furry wikipedia roaming on the net.", commented Nothingkat. "I figured it to be a rather one-sided "don't talk about the bad, only use it as a propaganda site to make furries look good" website. What I found it to be instead was a rather well done unbiased encyclopedia on the fandom."
WikiFur covers the entire spectrum of furry culture and community, from comics and anthropomorphic artwork to multiplayer worlds, fanzines and other publications, television programs and people. In many cases, details are contributed by those directly involved in the topic.
WikiFur is maintained by its administrators, who include prominent convention organizers, artists, writers, and other furry fans. Their duties are shared by every user - to make good contributions to new and existing articles, protect the site from vandalism, and uphold the principles of fair and unbiased writing.
About the author
GreenReaper (Laurence Parry) — read stories — contact (login required)a developer, editor and Kai Norn from London, United Kingdom, interested in wikis and computers
Small fuzzy creature who likes cheese & carrots. Founder of WikiFur, lead admin of Inkbunny, and Editor-in-Chief of Flayrah.
Comments
To refresh my memory, WHY are we not posting these articles on Wikipedia?
Capsule summary (mostly touched on already above):
Articles on Wikipedia can only stay if you might expect J. Random Public to run a query for them.
Articles on WikiFur are appropriate if J. Random _Furry_ might run a query for them.
It's a question of scope, mostly. Material transferred back to Wikipedia would probably be best received if aggregated (e.g. a page about WikiFur might not be notable enough, but a "list of noteworthy furry web sites" might be).
I'm on WikiSabbatical (and have enough on my hands managing lunacy in the science topics), so I won't be doing any of the porting myself, but it's certainly been interesting seeing WikiFur (and WikiPedia) grow.
-Deuce
Wikipedia is a general encyclopedia. It works on the prinicple of verifiability and demands that topics should be encyclopediaic (which some people interpret in part as requiring a certain measure of notability). Unfortunately, there is far more of interest to the furry fandom than is verifiable through typical means. Put simply, Wikipedia has standards that mean that much of what is interesting about the furry fandom could not be put on there - or rather, it could, but easily three quarters of it would be deleted out of hand, and most of the rest would be dubious.
To put this in perspective, an article about WikiFur itself got deleted, although I actually believe it was the right decision at the time - WikiFur was only a month old. Even now it would probably not be worthy of an article page by Wikipedia standards (see website proposed policy, google test). They have become more strict about things over time.
There are also a few people on Wikipedia who think that furry is overrated and who will battle to keep it out of as many pages as possible. I try not to focus on this as it doesn't have much bearing on whether or not we should be writing articles about the fandom there, but it is an issue affecting the creation of furry-related articles that is avoided by being on a separate site. Certainly, the fact that people were creating the articles in the first place was a demonstration of the need for some place for them.
On the other hand, it is true that there are many topics in the fandom that are valid subjects for Wikipedia. We welcome appropriate copying of works on notable between the two websites, and a small minority of our own articles are derived in part from Wikipedia articles (in time, I suspect the process will work in reverse; I know of at least one case where this has actually happened).
We also link back and forth between the articles on the same or similar topics on both sites - indeed, a significant proportion of our traffic currently comes direct from Wikipedia. Hopefully the visitors are not disappointed by what they find.
See my initial manifesto, WikiFur - A home for the furry community for further details. I consider WikiFur to be definitely achieving the goals I set out at this point in time - indeed, it's doing a little better than I hoped.
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