[Foundation-l] Incubator Wiki for New Wikimedia Projects (was Vote to create Wikiversity Vote)

Fri Nov 11 18:23:37 UTC 2005

Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>Maybe we need an incubator Wiki for potential new sister projects. 
>Wikicities is certainly not the solution for that.  Wikicities is a
>for-profit project complete with advertising being run by a for-profit
>company whose only tie to Wikimedia is that its two founders are on
>the board of directors of Wikimedia (one of whom is the founder of
>Wikipedia).
>
>Anthony
>  
>
I would agree that there is a need for an incubator project.  Clearly 
the jump from minor discussion on this list and a minor writeup on the 
Meta Wiki to turning on a seperate Wiki domain is much larger than 
comparable projects on Wikicities, just for instance.  As far as 
Wikicities not being the correct solution, I would have to in general 
agree but from everything I've seen that is the current recommended 
solution with just about everybody strongly pushed onto Wikicities if 
their content doesn't fit a current Wikimedia project.  Even the new 
projects proposal page strongly recommends Wikicities.

I do want to emphasis, however, that Wikibooks is not the place to do 
this either.  This is a need for a whole new project altogether.  Are 
you interested in helping me with organizing that project?  The 
Foundation board has talked about this issue from time to time, but 
there is a need to really sit down and try to come up with the 
guidelines for when a project can be started on the incubator/test wiki. 
 This is a policy issue rather than a technical issue.  This is also 
something that rather than an abstract idea, there needs to be something 
written as a formal proposal with debate over the principle ideas for 
how the whole process would work.  Eventually it would also require a 
change in the New Projects policy as well, with the ability to both 
create and cull projects from the incubator Wiki.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning