User:Leucosticte/Inclupedia
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Inclupedia [{{{recentchanges URL}}} Recent changes] [No WikiNode] [No About] [No Mobile URL] |
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| Founded by: | |
| Status: | In preparation |
| Language: | Multilingual |
| Edit mode: | OpenEdit |
| Wiki engine: | MediaWiki |
| Wiki license: | Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike"Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike" is not in the list (Custom license, Attribution to contributing authors, Copyright to contributing authors, Site retains copyright, WTFPL, Licence Art Libre, Open Content License, Apache License, BSD Documentation License, FreeBSD Documentation License, ...) of allowed values for the "Wiki license" property. |
| Main topic: | General |
| Wiki size: | 0 article pages |
Inclupedia aspires to be the largest, most inclusive wiki encyclopedia in the world. It is envisaged as a combination mirror of, and supplement to, Wikipedia.[1] The lead developer of this project is Nathan Larson. The URL http://inclupedia.org currently redirects to the coordination wiki for this project (and other Inclumedia projects), Meta-Inclu.
There was, during 2010, an almost completely empty placeholder wiki at that URL. It had an uppercase letter "I" as its logo. As it had little or no content, no attempt was made to move the wiki when Inclumedia migrated to another webhost.
It is envisaged that all the software needed to implement Inclupedia will be open-source and copylefted and consist almost entirely of MediaWiki extensions and bots that use existing MediaWiki bot frameworks. Some hooks will be added to the MediaWiki core, and plans call for making attempt to get changes adding these hooks merged to the MediaWiki codebase, rather than forking the code. Plans call for thoroughly documenting all features in an effort to make it as easy as possible for other developers and system administrators to modify the code and use it in their own wikis.
History
The idea of the project was first conceived circa 19 March 2008. At that time, the working name was SpiritWorldWiki, a reference to the Mormon idea that there might be more than two places articles could go (good articles going to heaven (Wikipedia) and bad articles going to hell (deletion); SpiritWorldWiki could be a destination for articles that are neither good enough for the Celestial Kingdom (Wikipedia) nor bad enough for the Telestial Kingdom (deletion), but rather could go to the Spirit World (SpiritWorldWiki) while awaiting their final destination. Some might end up in the Terrestrial Kingdom (i.e. an Inclupedia-like wiki). The analogy was, however, considered too confusing to be useful.[2]
Later, the working name was changed to "Wikuna Matata", a reference to the phrase "hakuna matata", which means "without worries." This was a reference to the fact that users would have more freedom to create pages without needing to worry that they would be deleted. The name "Inclupedia" was chosen in mid-2010.
Inclupedia has been in development hell since the idea's inception. Vain attempts were made to get Wikimedia interested by posting the proposal to Meta-Wiki on 14 July 2010 and to the English Wikipedia idea lab on 26 July 2010.[3] Then naive attempts were made to solicit paid developer involvement for ridiculously small sums, by means of open-source bounties that would have been worthy of listing at Whartonite Seeks Code Monkey, except that they were never brought to WSCM's attention.
Next, legal problems delayed Inclupedia's progress from 11 December 2008 to 9 February 2010. Development began on MirrorTools on 8 July 2010. Legal problems again delayed Inclupedia development from 11 August 2010 to 12 June 2012. Development resumed on 29 August 2012, but then legal problems delayed Inclupedia development from 3 December 2012 to 2 October 2013. Attorney Brooke Sealy Rupert had noted, "Mr. Larson has worked on pursuing his dream of creating a general purpose, collaborative research website, Inclupedia, that does not have the content restrictions of other similar sites. The proposal has generated some interest, and Mr. Larson has supporters willing to work with him on the software production necessary for the project."[4] Larson himself told the court, "I've been making progress. I've been developing code, gaining confidence at it. And I believe that the Inclupedia, this Internet company I'm building could be important for the world."[5]
A futile attempt to recruit additional developers from the wikitech community was made on 13 January 2014. A prospective software development trainee and business partner made an appointment to receive on-the-job training at Inclumedia's Catlett, VA headquarters in setting up his MediaWiki development environment and test wiki and fixing a few bugs under Larson's mentorship. The trainee called in sick on 14 January 2014, then cancelled out for 18 January 2014 citing a last-minute church obligation, then postponed from 25 January to 26 January, saying that he'd looked at the wrong date on his calendar, then cancelled out for 26 January, citing yet another church obligation, then cancelled out again at the last minute on 27 January, saying his cash flow situation prevented him from paying the $80 for a portable hard drive and Ethernet cable needed to get started. Larson then fired him for excessive flakiness and decided to pursue Inclupedia development singlehandedly.
Development resumed on 23 January 2014. The development process has thus far spawned many abandoned development branches that resulted in complete code rewritings, as various approaches were found to be ill-conceived or unworkable. On 29 January 2014, Larson noted, "This Inclupedia programming is like wandering through a really complicated maze with just a notepad with which to keep track of all the dead ends, and having to keep retracing my steps and starting over. It definitely takes a long time to get to that satisfying point at which I can run it and see it work. The part I dread the most is still ahead, though — debugging any database inconsistencies that might arise due to glitchy code. Hopefully I can catch all of those before production deployment, but who knows."