Hello Language Committee,

I am writing today to share a proposal for an experiment addressing a new approach to onboarding a language wiki.

Since December 2023, we have had conversations with 35 relevant stakeholders, including three members from the Language Committee (Tochi, Mf-Warburg, and Jon), to develop recommendations addressing a few current challenges with the incubation journey. As a result of these discussions, several recommendations emerged, which are documented here https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Future_of_Language_Incubation/Recommendations which can be broadly grouped into the following two key areas:

1. Streamlining technical infrastructure  

2. Exploring social pathways

For the 2024-25 annual planned work of the Wikimedia Foundation and as part of the Content Growth objective (WE2/Knowledge Equity), the Language and Product Localization team with guidance from the Language Committee members, identified a recommendation that addresses some of the difficulties of content creation in the Incubator due to technical limitations of the platform. To address this, we would like to try the following: 

Identify a set of requests (maximum 5) from the list in the new wiki approval backlog which have been either already approved by the Language Committee and, prioritize their creation on the production infrastructure so that they do not have to continue writing content on the incubator wiki. At the end of a stipulated period we evaluate progress of these prioritized wikis compared to other test projects (approved or otherwise) still in the incubator. 

Please see the detailed proposal, including selection and inclusion criteria, timeline, implementation plan, and more information.  We also presented this proposal at Wikimania 2024: https://youtu.be/BbGrkYK8FEk?t=20299

After consultations with several other teams inside the WMF relevant to this area of work we believe this is a feasible starting point towards better content creation experiences for newer communities. To move onwards we would like to reach a shared agreement with the Language Committee and start off the pilot. Based on the criteria listed in the email, we would like to include as part of the experiment following list of wikis (also see attached screenshot): 

• Mapudungun

• Southern Ndebele

• Obolo

• Tai Nüa

• Pannonian Rusyn

We would like to kick off this experiment as early as possible and would really appreciate hearing your suggestions on changes or additions to the selection criteria and initial list of wikis by August 24th.

Cheers,

Srishti

Srishti Sethi Senior Developer Advocate Wikimedia Foundation