Delirium wrote:
I'm sure others disagree, but IMO it would be
better if there were not
a particularly easy way to start new projects. We so far have exactly
one highly successful project, from what I can tell---Wikipedia.
Wiktionary has been languishing for years now in relative disuse (and
in my brief attempts to use it to look up words, doesn't have enough
words in it to be useful as a dictionary, driving me back to
reference.com), Wikisource is still getting off the ground and is
fairly disorganized, and Wikibooks has only in the last 6 months seen
any books that are remotely close to being reasonable books (and even
the ones labeled with 4 blocks as "complete" are still *far* short of
book length and detail... we have nothing on Wikibooks that can
compete with a commercial textbook). I'd rather we spent some time
working on these projects we already have instead of spawning off
still more projects, lest we become a clearinghouse of ideas that were
started but never really carried through.
To be clear, this isn't opposition to Wikinews---I think Wikinews is a
well-defined project with a clear group of users interested in working
on it and minimal overlap with other projects, but I think that would
be a good place to stop for now. After starting Wikinews, and
counting Wikispecies, we'll have six projects---Wikipedia, Wiktionary,
Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikispecies, and Wikisource---of which only one,
Wikipedia, is really in a well-developed state.
Perhaps I shouldn't presume to speak on behalf of projects I have yet to
participate in, but the list seems to be missing Wikiquote, the
Wikimedia Commons, and the 9/11 Memorial wiki, at least two of which I
would consider more significant and more successful than the
controversial Wikispecies. Frankly, I wondered why there was so much
insistence on having Wikispecies when contributions stopped completely
after a few days, but now they seem to have started back up again.
I agree that we are close to tackling more projects than we can hope to
do well for now. Wikinews makes a persuasive case, and I see Wikijunior
(or whatever we call it) as being less a fork than a subproject of
Wikipedia, so I'm happy if they manage to go forward. But if we need
challenges, I would like to see us get serious about tackling other
types of media (starting with print), not just cast about for new
specialties in the one medium we've done well in so far.
--Michael Snow