[Wikipedia-l] Rethinking Meta (was- Wikiquote now has subdomains)

Mon Jul 19 02:46:00 UTC 2004

Tim-
> Wikiquote now has specific-language subdomains. Instead of creating
> wikis for all 150 languages, I made a system where wikis are only
> created when they're wanted. To save time during maintenance operations,
> it should now be possible to delete unused Wiktionaries and even
> Wikipedias until they are required.

This may be a good time to rethink our approach to Meta. Currently there  
is just one big, messy Meta-Wiki, with neither particularly clear policies  
(although my CPOV draft attempts to remedy this to some extent) nor  
interlanguage links. Help texts are spread across the "MediaWiki User's  
Guide" and the Help: namespace, with non-English texts in the English  
language Help: space. On the other hand, as Mav keeps pointing out, we  
have no real community editable Wikimedia presence.

How about a setup like this:
de.wikimedia.org
en.wikimedia.org
fr.wikimedia.org
...

This is more logical (Meta is not just about Wikipedia but about all  
Wikimedia projects), it allows us to use interlanguage links, to see RC  
only for the languages you are interested in, and to maintain the  
documentation separately for each language in the respective localized  
Help: namespace. It would encourage internationalization for things like  
project-wide votes.

The major downside: In the present system, you would have to create an  
account for each edition of Meta. So it might make sense to postpone this  
until Single Sign-On is implemented.

In any case, I think there should be no separate Meta-Wiki and Wikimedia  
Foundation wiki - they should be the same thing.

Thoughts?

Regards,

Erik