2018-07-25 17:58 GMT+03:00 Steven White <Koala19890(a)hotmail.com>om>:
As I wrote at the phabricator task, I agree in
principle. But the devil is
in the details, of course, and as one of the couple of people who are *de
facto* running Incubator right now, I need to be involved in all of this.
Thank you very much. Getting feedback like this is my precise intention
behind starting this thread.
More replies inline.
One of the things that this discussion has me thinking about, though, is
whether Incubator should actually be effectively closed and locked, or
whether there should be three tiers: projects, incubating projects, and
then Incubator. Here's why I'm thinking along these lines (even if only as
a transition step):
- As of the last major evaluation of Incubator (last winter), there
were 1,020 tests on Incubator with at least one valid page of content. One
was the most recently exported project, which we generally keep as a
duplicate on Incubator for administrative reasons. Of the other 1,019:
0. Woah, I didn't think it's so many.
1. Having these numbers is super-valuable, thanks.
2. How did you count? Is there a tool?
-
- 502 (49%) were either "active" (defined as one new page creation
since the beginning of 2017) or "substantial" (defined as having at
least
25 mainspace pages), or both. This included two that were approved but
awaiting creation at the time.
1. Again, how did you count?
2. Are the terms "active" and "substantial" defined anywhere? Or did
you
coin them ad hoc for this thread?
3. 500 is quite a lot. If we suddenly create wikis for all of them
according to my proposal, this will be a huge sudden addition of languages
to the interlanguage links list, at least in a few hundreds articles, and
this may be too many to add at once.
4. Do you know what is the per-project breakdown—Wikipedia, Wikivoyage,
Wikibooks, etc.?
-
- Of the remainder, only 15 had sufficient activity to meet the
project approval activity requirement. Perhaps another 15 or so were pretty
close.
Let's approve them[1] :)
-
- My estimate (purely an estimate) is that there are rarely more
than 40–50 tests with substantial activity at any point in time.
Unlike 500, this sounds like a reasonable addition, although it probably
must not be done all in one day. It would still be a pretty big addition to
the interlanguage links list, to the list of languages that support
Wikidata sitelinks, etc. Spreading the incubator-project creation for a
month or two should be reasonable.
- Incubator also provides a certain buffer zone around tests that are
kind of borderline with respect to the current Language Proposal Policy.
Many such projects are all the same very legitimate tests with communities
working on them, and meet Incubator's less restrictive rules for
creating tests.
- See
https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:
Incubator:Test_wikis/open-but-rejected
<https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Incubator:Test_wikis/open-but-rejected>.
Many of the projects in this category are Wikipedias in historical
languages, and a handful of those are quite active.
Hmm, that's a slightly tough one. However, I really don't want this
discussion to go in the direction of arguing about historical languages
policy. Whatever the policy is, I don't want the argument about this to
become a blocker for creating a better environment to develop wikis for
living languages, which is the intention of my proposal.
- Looking at the above, I'm pretty sure that at least at the
beginning, we should only move out the most active projects, perhaps 20 to
no more than about 50. This way, we can get the bugs out without having
created 500 or so incubation subdomains.
Sounds sensible, see above. I even welcome you to create semi-artificial
criteria that would put the number of the first test wikis at around 50 :)
Thinking about "getting the bugs out" is a sensible thing to consider, too.
- Certainly during that period of time Incubator would stay open as
usual for all other tests.
Yeah, that's OK.
- After that, I think there are some serious things to think about:
- If a test is fairly substantial (25 pages? 100 pages?), do we
create the incubation subdomain even if the test has been dormant for a
while?
I guess that I'd do one of the following:
1. Define what does "a while" mean. For example, we can decide, somewhat
arbitrarily, that a project under
incubator.wikimedia.org in which there
were no edits for over a year, will be considered "dormant" and that a test
wiki won't be created for it until somebody asks.
2. Just use case by case intuition.
-
- Conversely, many tests open with a flurry of activity (over 1 day
to 2 months), then go dormant.
So, here's my theory behind the whole proposal: In the current incubator,
people quickly create a bunch of articles on topics that interest them,
sometimes with some boilerplate (cities, countries, animals), but but then
they get tired of the prefixes, the outdated translation techniques, the
weird searching, the missing templates, etc., and give up. Perhaps with a
single wiki these difficulties will be alleviated. I know it sounds a bit
too optimistic, but at least I want to get rid of these most glaring and
arbitrary difficulties, with the hope that it will help people remain
active.
-
- Going forward, do we really want to create incubation subdomains
for these right away, and then have them go dark? Or do we want there to be
some kind of threshold for creating incubation subdomains? And if there's
some kind of threshold, then Incubator needs to remain alive for projects
not yet there.
Yes, I tend to thing that we should allow to create new subdomains for
*eligible* languages right away, so that all of them will get equal
treatment as early as possible, from the very first page.
I want editing to be easy for everyone. Including people with bad internet
connections, people who only have mobile, people who had never edited wikis
in other languages. I don't think that the current Incubator makes anything
easy for anyone, but hey, I may be missing something.
What I think makes a lot of sense is for the most
active, close-to-ready
tests to move into incubation subdomains, where they can start having
access to Wikidata, get rid of prefixes, and so forth. I'm not sure that
means there isn't a place for Incubator as a place for projects to get
started in the extreme early stages
I'm flexible as to what should be done with
incubator.wikimedia.org when
the new system is in place. I don't mind if it remains writeable at least
for some time, even several years.
If the new system works well, I guess that it will become read-only at some
point, but I don't strongly care about when will this happen.
Again, thanks a lot for all the comments!
=====
[1] This was a semi-joke. Please don't start the seven-day countdown. But
if they are ready to approve, then perhaps we should look for experts.