[Foundation-l] a crazy idea...

Wed Sep 7 23:34:23 UTC 2005

On 9/7/05, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/30/05, Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:
> 
> > 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
> [...]
> I've been thinking this over for a few days, and I believe the option
> of reunifying meta and the Foundation wiki makes most sense.

Sorry, I strongly disagree. IMHO the most important problems with the
foundation wiki are
* the lack of navigation
* outdated pages
* the issue that it is a wiki

The foundation wiki is a mess, and I don't see how it would help to
put it together with a website that's more messy.

> The
> separation means little to external people and only causes extra work
> for internal people.

We need a place on the web where people, who are not (yet) wiki
experts can find reliable (I don't mean "reliable" in the wiki sense
which actually means "sometimes reliable, sometimes not") information
about us.

Let's think about how to achieve this, and not how to replace a mess
with another one (bigger or smaller).

Some ideas that could help:
* Look out for a content management system (a wiki is not a cms). In
the best case one  that is able to handle multilingual content
(switching to default language if translation is not up to date)
* Think about which pages we really need (a real concept would help)
* Think about reducing the number of languages (which would be less
important if we find a cms that can handle multilingual content as
described above)
* Looking for people who take the responsibility for the website.

-- Arne (akl)