On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 2:59 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Wil Sinclair wrote:
Hi all, I've started a new wiki called Offwiki: http://offwiki.org. Our community discusses potential changes to Wikipedia and its Wikimedia sister projects that aren't easily discussed in forums like this mailing list. We also try new ideas that we hope will be adopted on-wiki- both social and technical in nature.
Welcome back!
I enjoyed the utensil analogy on the main page. It's very cute. :-)
Spoon: If Offwiki were common cutlery, it would be a spoon. It's not a knife, because we don't make our points here by hurting Wikipedia or other Wikipedia-related sites. And it's not a fork, because we're here to build a better encyclopedia by making Wikipedia itself better.
I also applaud the effort in setting up your own MediaWiki installation. MediaWiki is a neat platform; it can be a bit brutish at times, but it has a lot of nice features, including a decent support structure and a vibrant development community behind it.
We have had a number (not enough!) of Wikimedia (usually Wikipedia, and typically English Wikipedia) discussion sites, but has there been any previous ones that have used mediawiki? That is, other than Meta.. ?
IMO it is unfortunate that Wil didnt hasnt made more use of Meta, and I am curious what the reasoning behind that decision was. There are very few people banned from Meta, thought it does happen occasionally and is usually reversed if they can behave.
I am also very curious about who came up with the Offwiki term 'Flounder'. http://offwiki.org/wiki/Meta:Proposals#Flounders To me it feels like a very nasty slur against Jimmy Wales.
Also, will Offwiki be multilingual? Does it intend to cover projects other than English Wikipedia? If not, it isnt very relevant to the wikimedia-l list, but is of course relevant to wikien-l which I have cc:d which appears to be its primary focus.
-- John Vandenberg