[Foundation-l] a crazy idea...

Tue Aug 30 03:32:13 UTC 2005

Hi all,

When I thought about some of the latest discussions on the list and 
meta-wiki here, I had a little crazy idea.

The Wikimedia Foundation website was created a few months ago because we 
wanted something clean and clear to present to outside visitors. People 
shouldn't have to dive in the mess on meta-wiki for getting information 
about Wikimedia.

However, this plan didn't work out in my opinion. WMF wiki isn't 
regularly updated, people aren't sure what should be on meta and what on 
wmf, content is duplicated on meta-wiki, translations have to be 
regularly moved from meta to the wmf wiki and so on.

In my opinion, there are three options:
* we can continue like this and try to make the best out of it
* we can drastically reduce the number of pages on WMF, limit the 
translations and make it a very simple information site (similar to what 
was done on http://www.wikimedia.de, the german associations site)
* or we can reunify meta-wiki and the WMF wiki under 
http://www.wikimedia.org

Before some of you call now "impossible", I'd like you to think about 
it. We've managed to build an encyclopedia which is visited by thousands 
of people daily in a wiki. Of course, sometimes you find goatze on the 
main page - that's wikipedia. If an open wiki is acceptable for the most 
famous encyclopedia on the internet, it isn't for the little 
organization behind? Do we really need a classical website, with all its 
failures? Can't we just be proud of what we do and say: Yes, we build an 
encyclopedia in a wiki - and our organisation website is a wiki, too.

and as wikipedia proves, you can organize a wiki in a way that visitors 
are able to find the stuff they want to know - professional looking 
mainpage etc. It just has to be done, and I think the community of 
wikimedians which is populating meta-wiki is now big enough to do this. 
  Important and official pages can be protected, inofficial opinion 
pages can be marked with templates...

If we want something not to be known, it should be done in a closed wiki 
anyway - as the google case has shown, the press isn't able to 
differentiate anyway between something said officially on the WMF 
website and something on a page on meta. There are multiple ways to make 
clear what is official or not, to lead the press to specifically 
dedicated pages while also providing different information for the wiki 
experienced community. And if a reporter finds the "List of wikipedians 
by favoured ice-cream flavour", so what? that's our community.

Test wikipedias would be moved from meta to somewhere else, as well as 
the mediawiki documentation (there is now a dedicated mediawiki wiki) to 
not clutter up recentchanges anymore.

Unifying meta and wmf would also help to bridge the slowly growing gap 
between the community and the organisation Wikimedia. Since Wikimedia 
depends on the work of volunteers, I see this as a rather dangerous 
thing. It more and more becomes "they and us" while it should be "we".

Last but not least I have to admin, that I feel that there are simply 
too many wikis and websites to keep track. On my list (incomplete):
* german wikipedia, english wikipedia, commons, mediawiki wiki, 
developer wiki, meta-wiki, german board wiki, german wikimedia website, 
wikimedia foundation website, chapter wiki, grants wiki (as good as 
closed), otrs

So, I propose this for consideration and for discussing the idea to 
death, as usual ;-)

greetings,
elian