Why a Motorcycle Wiki?
Question: No offense but why would I use this site over wikipedia.org?
- Wikipedia is an encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines), not a bike reference site. Its goals go no further than an encyclopedia, and material that does not fit this goal must be moved to another Wikimedia project or removed altogether
- Ablity to make subpages that include reviews (which can be acknowledgely biased), videos, and additional information. On Wikipedia subpages are not allowed on the MAIN namespace. Having subpages on the main namespace is something useful for now as when we make a page such as Suzuki GSX-R1000/Videos it links back to the main page.
- Ability to include relevant youtube and googlevideo videos of each model.
- Other people will inevitably look for a motorcycle wiki in other places than wikipedia, and I aim to accomodate them. Prominent examples of successful topics for community wikis include Star Wars/Star Trek(Wookieepedia), Transformers, Muppets, Game Strategy Wiki, and one of my main inspirations for this wiki the 350z-Tech wiki.
- Wikipedia is also quite controlling when it comes to posting images of bikes. Most of my images come from the Honda Motorcycle Identification Guide. They aren't creative works and hence I'm not worried about copy right infringement with them.
- We aim to more inclusive than wikipedia.
I originally considered simply making a simple php database driven website, but decided a wiki meets the goals of this project better than anything else, with one of the major factors being that it allows other people to contribute.
I can run a bot on my wiki to make mass edits (say change every instance of "V4" to a link about V-4 motorcycles), which I can't easily do on wikipedia.
As for plagiarism, yes I originally seeded much of the info from wikipedia, I'm not trying to plagiarise in any way but you can freely copy any information from wikipedia as long as you reference them as the source. I have created a template for articles which are from wikipedia
{{Fromwikipedia|title=Honda_VFR800}}
to attribute wikipedia as being the source of the original article. I've added this tag to the article in question.
Hopefully that answered some of your questions instead of raising more.