[Foundation-l] Project proposals on meta

Sat Nov 13 21:44:21 UTC 2004

Erik Moeller wrote:
> Elisabeth-
> 
>>Since many people complained to me about Meta being an unusable
>>labyrinth, I'd like to do a little bit of cleanup and wondered if we
>>could just move this list to wikicities (jimbo's pet project where
>>people can set up wikis on their own) and direct new entries on meta of
>>the type "oh there is no wiki on ... what about ...?" to wikicities:
>>http://www.wikicities.com/index.php/Proposed_wikis
> 
> No, please don't do that. While I like Wikicities, I want Wikimedia itself  
> to be and remain at the forefront of exploring new and innovative uses of  
> wikis. Discussion is a large part of that. 

Most of there proposals weren't discussed at all, but just thrown - 
often anonymously - on meta and left there for good, mostly orphaned. 
Seriously, I don't see us setting up more than a handful new projects in 
the near future: Wikinews and later maybe Wikiversity and Wikijunior.

> I agree that many of the  
> proposals will not have a future as separate projects, but for most of the  
> useful ones, I see potential for integration into existing ones. Instead  
> of encouraging separate projects, we should systematically explore how to  
> integrate good ideas into the Wikimedia framework. What cannot happen  
> today may very well happen tomorrow.

Now, then do it ;-) Start with 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Slotipedia_-_A_Proposal
and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikindex ?

> NPOV also dictates that we do not give preference to any outside wiki  
> hosting company. Why direct the Wikimedia community to wikicities.com and  
> not myoo.de or wikidev.net, both of which are run by MediaWiki developers?  

IMO NPOV policy is meant for the content of Wikimedia projects, but you 
are certainly right that we shouldn't give any preference to an outside 
project.

> I think a general note about wiki hosting on the talk page is more  
> appropriate.

This seems like a good idea, I modified the intro on the proposals page 
accordingly.

We should probably communicate better what Wikimedia is about - spread 
of knowledge and not wiki hosting for any cool idea in general.

greetings,
elian