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

Wed Nov 16 13:03:38 UTC 2005

Ray Saintonge wrote:

> The answer to deletionist controversies should not always be to 
> establish a new project; it should lie in an attempt to find common 
> ground.  That's something which a certain cadre of people on Wikipedia 
> refuses to seriously consider.  I don't know what rules the Wikijunior 
> people have been violating in Wikibooks, but that is an omnous claim.  
> It seems to reflect the usual dynamic conflict between those who want 
> clarity and certainty, and those who treasure innovation as a primary 
> value.  A project has a serious problem when either of those two gains 
> dominance.
>
The issue I have with Wikijunior is not that it is necessarily violating 
Wikibooks policies, but that it exists in its own seperate domain in 
many ways with its own set of policies, governed by groups of people 
that otherwise have nothing to do with Wikibooks, or at least are not 
actively participating in the larger Wikibooks community.  Policy 
decisions being made on Meta are being applied to Wikibooks, which IMHO 
is especially difficult to deal with, especially when users and even 
admins on Wikibooks are not even aware that these decisions are even 
being made.  I'm not talking general policies that apply to all 
projects, but decisions about just the Wikijunior pages on Wikibooks. 
 This is especially difficult when long-term policy discussions are 
taking place that a new contributor to Wikijunior has almost no way to 
learn about unless they are already very well versed with Wikimedia 
politics.  There already is a small but growing community that is 
working on just Wikijunior pages and very little else on any other 
Wikimedia project.  I don't know of any other comparable situation like 
this for any other Wikimedia project.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning