Incubator:Rules of the road

DRAFT

The purpose of Incubator Plus 2.0 is to provide a place to create and host Wikimedia-like projects not eligible to be created on Wikimedia Incubator or elsewhere within the Wikimedia universe. But with the exception of the eligibility of the projects for creation within Wikimedia, this site's projects should otherwise be substantially the same as projects in Wikimedia. For that reason, you can easily understand that most rules here closely parallel those on Wikimedia Incubator and in the individual projects (Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc.). Where rules to the contrary are not clearly spelled out here, or on other pages in Category:Incubator:Policy, you should assume that the corresponding Wikimedia rules apply.

Competing with Wikimedia
This site does not intend to compete with Wikimedia in any way whatsoever. Accordingly, you may not create a test project here that substantially duplicates a project (or test project) in the Wikimedia universe. Understanding that some tests may fall into a gray area, here are some examples to use. When in doubt, ask the administrators. What is the difference between the second and third cases? There are two differences, really: Even in the allowed cases, it is important that pages based on existing Wikimedia material have attribution, so as to comply with the copyright/licensing rules both on the source page and here. Material without attribution is considered a copyright violation, and copyright violations are subject to speedy deletion.
 * An Italian encyclopedia project written in standard Italian, so as to be effectively the same as Italian Wikipedia: NOT ALLOWED.
 * A Chinese encyclopedia project written in Pinyin: IT DEPENDS.
 * An Italian encyclopedia project written in Cyrillic: ALLOWED.
 * The possibility of having a Han-to-Pinyin conversion script running on Chinese Wikipedia, because it would be useful to a wide community of people, is a real one. Accordingly, a Chinese encyclopedia in Pinyin might be a duplicate to Chinese Wikipedia running such a script. In contrast, it is highly unlikely that there would be a community need for a Latin-to-Cyrillic script on Italian Wikipedia.
 * However, in the second case, if the Chinese Wikipedia community decided it did not want to host such a converter—or if there is some evidence that attempts to create the converter are not working well, Incubator Plus 2.0 might nevertheless allow the Pinyin project to proceed here. The idea of Italian in Cyrillic has already been rejected at Italian Wikipedia and on Meta, so such a project can run here.

Projects (or contents) based on fringe or extreme points of view
Because there is always some disagreement at the border between "what is a language" and "what is a dialect", we expect to be a little flexible about the definitions of bias and neutrality here, compared to Wikimedia projects. But points of view that are extremist or fringe are not acceptable here. In particular:
 * Projects whose basis is linguistic will generally be allowed.
 * A dictionary project in Dari, as opposed to Persian/Farsi: ALLOWED.
 * A dictionary project in German based on usage in the former East Germany: CAN STAY IF IT STAYS POLITICALLY NEUTRAL, NOT OTHERWISE.
 * Projects whose basis is political will generally not be allowed.