[Foundation-l] A general wiki list?

Wed Aug 22 17:08:37 UTC 2007

On 8/22/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> I think many people would actually be a bit flustered if we tried to
> create a "neutral" wiki discussion list. A better place for that seems
> to me a site like wiki.org, which is operated by Ward Cunningham.
> Perhaps you should ask him if he'd be willing to host it?

While I still think that such list should be hosted by WM and that
there are a number of reasons why it should be, I realize that the
situation is not clear enough and that it is the best to open the list
somewhere else.

So, I asked ibiblio for a list and supporting wiki, because I think
that it is the most neutral territory. However, if some similar
project grows (or it is grown, but for now unknown), merging two
projects will be desired.

Angela told me about spreadwiki.org project which is still in
development phase. As the goals of that project are to spread and help
in adoption of wiki technology, it is very close to the aim of the
list which I want to make. However, I think that making list and it's
supporting wiki have very simple requirements (software and
organizational) and that it is possible to be made immediately. So,
when spreadwiki starts to exist on the net, we may merge projects.

And there are some more points:

- List/wiki should be administrated by delegates of all major wiki
projects (what is major wiki project?) or by delegates of delegates.
Is someone else interested in definitions and organization? Related to
this, some balance between participating projects and people
participating in the projects should be found (it shouldn't be good
that WM projects eat all others because of the number of contributors,
but it shouldn't be good that WM is represented like projects with 10
contributors).
- List/wiki should be promoted on the participating wikis as a general one.
- The goal of the list/wiki is to gather different ideas related to
the wiki concept. So, it is preferable to give to different people
possibility to talk. However, it shouldn't be used for bizarre and
nonsense ideas as well as it shouldn't be used for hate speech and
similar things. This means that while a majority of wiki projects are
welcome in the administrating body, some of them are not, for sure (a
week or two ago I think that someone pointed to one of such wikis; I
forgot the name of the wiki).
- People from ibiblio are fast and it seems that the project will be
up today. However, some more discussion here would be a good idea.