[Foundation-l] Re: meta-discussion for new project proposals (was Proposal for new project: Faith Wiki)

Wed Jun 29 20:45:16 UTC 2005

Dovi Jacobs wrote:

>But it does seem that the vast majority of needs are covered by the existing projects.
>So I agree with the general sentiment that most of the effort should be going into bettering
>the existing projects, though this does not mean there cannot be new projects. We should indeed guide people as to how they can build their ideas within the existing projects.
>
I agree with this, and think a lot of what people want in new projects 
could be taken care of by new views on the same data, which is more a 
matter of coding, software architecture, and user-interface design than 
a new project per se.  For example, Wikispecies has a strong overlap 
with Wikipedia---it's generally accepted (at least in en:) that any 
recognized species about which any data is available is an appropriate 
candidate for an article, and many people agree that it would be nice if 
we had some sort of structured data in Wikipedia that would allow 
querying/etc. (essentially the sort of standard information that ends up 
in various info boxes, like elevation for a mountain peak). 

Given that, it should be possible for a database of species and 
Wikipedia to share the same information, just present and query it in 
different ways.  So in both this case and others, I'd lean more towards 
a long-term solution along these lines, rather than starting more 
projects with duplicate information that needs to be kept in sync.  An 
issue with user-interface or software can be fixed, but if we end up 
with multiple projects duplicating information, merging them at a later 
date is much harder.

-Mark