Is there any reason why pages that either don't exist or have very minimal text at the moment (eg ‘Jeremy Bentham’) can’t just be copied wholesale from their Wikipedia entry? The latter might not be perfect and the style might occasionally not match if WF is for advocacy as well as info, but there’s nothing to stop us from then editing it on WF (or on both pages). Wikipedia’s not copyrighted, and WF is non-profit, so I don’t think there’d be a legal issue… Meanwhile, would give us access to a lot more material.

If somebody want to copy a Wikipedia article to Felicifia and then expand it to make more references to utilitarianism, then I would see that as a value-added use of Wikipedia content.

One problem with copying pages from Wikipedia (and not having valuable content to add) is that, in many cases, there will be more people editing Wikipedia and the two will begin to diverge. If people edit the Felicifia version, and then a few years later the Felicifia version looks deficient relative to the Wikipedia version, then either the changes here will be lost when we copy Wikipedia again or somebody would have to examine the differences and edit the changes.

Some advantages of creating new content here is that more detailed information can be listed and other topics on philosophy, ethics, or social sciences can be described with frequent references to or comparisons with utilitarianism. It would be inappropriate to use Wikipedia to write about basic philosophical topics from a perspective of utilitarianism, but we can do that here.

Maybe just link to the Wikipedia entries and save the novel content for our wiki? It does sound messy and time-consuming to copy the content wholesale.

It's generally better for a site's usability and 'stickyness' if it doesn't needlessly send people off-site, IMO. This would be (I hope) a relatively quick way of getting copy in the short term - if it was particularly unwieldy it wouldn't be worth doing. If the two pages diverge, that's not a disaster - if WF takes off then, its articles should stay comparably as good as Wikipedia.

I agree on not taking philosophical pages essentially unrelated that we'd want to have written from a utilitarian perspective, but those would usually be quite different pages. Biographical etc pages or other topics which are collections of facts don't really need a perspective.

Arepo wrote:It's generally better for a site's usability and 'stickyness' if it doesn't needlessly send people off-site, IMO.

yes, as a general rule

Arepo wrote: This would be (I hope) a relatively quick way of getting copy in the short term

yes

Arepo wrote:if it was particularly unwieldy it wouldn't be worth doing. If the two pages diverge, that's not a disaster

True, and if there are fewer copied pages any burden or inaccuracies would be reduced.

Considering the above and the general problem of having out-of-sync or outdated files, my revised statement is that "initializing" felicifia pages using Wikipedia content would be a net gain as long as the number of pages is relatively small (a couple dozen at most?). If people are willing to maintain pages that are initially created in this way, then more pages would be a net gain. I would say that copying a hundred or more pages that are related to philosophy would become unruly in the long run unless people are actively working the pages.

In the short run, if we added 100+ pages and then got hit with more SPAM, it would be a real pain to fix. In the SPAM attack from the other day, many pages were hit more than once (one had maybe 6 separate SPAM edits that I reverted with one edit). The new SPAM-prevention measures might work for a few weeks, but having seen exactly how the other site was hit I can tell you that the current measures are inadequate (pm me for more info on this). With better SPAM protection, more pages would be less burdensome to me.

Although I'm happy to defer to a majority opinion, I'm somewhat more reluctant to use large chunks of wikipedia pieces at Wiki Felicifia. I suppose it's for a couple of reasons:
1. long segments of factual information, especially historical material are boring
2. wikipedia material will dilute wiki felicifia. I think wiki felicifia already gives people a taste of how utilitarians think. That's great and I don't want to lose that.
3. there's a compromise position that I favour. We include wikipedia material, but we make it obvious that we're doing so by quoting it. Once it's been rewritten substantially the material's taken out of quote marks. So we could start off, perhaps not with thousand word long wikipedia passages, but with salient paragraphs. Then, these quotes can be digested further and given basic utilitarian interpretation as I tried to do for the topic of poverty.

Thoughts?

RyanCarey wrote:... and given basic utilitarian interpretation as I tried to do for the topic of poverty.

That's actually a very nice little article.