[Foundation-l] Merge wikis

Tue Jul 5 00:38:56 UTC 2011

On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 2:40 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 07/01/2011 11:52 PM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
>> One thing I find irritating and complex about our structure is the
>> proliferation of small wikis. Now I've no objection to the idea that
>> we have a wiki for every language on Earth, though where languages are
>> mutually intelligible such as the major dialects of English  it seems
>> sensible to me that we combine them in one wiki - if necessary with
>> spelling and alphabet being subject to user preference.
>>
>> But I see no reason why ten wiki, Strategy and the various wikimanias
>> each need their own wiki as opposed to being projects within meta.
>>
>> On a broader and more radical note, why do we need separate wikis for
>> wikiquote, wikiversity, wikipedia wikinews and wiktionary? Surely each
>> of those could be separate namespaces within a language wiki?
>>
>> This would make it much easier when people create an article on
>> wikipedia that is really a wiktionary or wikinews article as one could
>> just move it. It would immediately reduce the number of userpages,
>> watchlists and usertalk pages that one needed to maintain to one per
>> language (plus meta and commons). It would also foster cooperation
>> between editors across what are currently different projects if you
>> had one wiki for each language, as individual wikiprojects would now
>> work across what are currently quite separate  news, quote and pedia
>> projects.
>
> Thanks for raising this issue. Previously discussed system of redirects
> and Incubator Extension [1] would help not just to the Incubator, but to
> the languages with smaller amount of speakers, as well as to Meta forks.
> So, instead of having numerous meta wikis, we could have just one
> (Meta), with separate namespaces, which would get redirects. Thus,
> namespace "Strategy:" could be strategy.wikimedia.org; namespace
> "Research" could be research.wikimedia.org etc.
>
> [1] http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/235020?page=last

I agree, a focus on new namespaces (perhaps with differentiated
editing permissions, per Liam) certainly looks like the best path
forward to me.

Thanks,
Richard
(User:Pharos)