Anthony DiPierro wrote:
Maybe we need an incubator Wiki for potential new
sister projects.
Wikicities is certainly not the solution for that. Wikicities is a
for-profit project complete with advertising being run by a for-profit
company whose only tie to Wikimedia is that its two founders are on
the board of directors of Wikimedia (one of whom is the founder of
Wikipedia).
Anthony
I would agree that there is a need for an incubator project. Clearly
the jump from minor discussion on this list and a minor writeup on the
Meta Wiki to turning on a seperate Wiki domain is much larger than
comparable projects on Wikicities, just for instance. As far as
Wikicities not being the correct solution, I would have to in general
agree but from everything I've seen that is the current recommended
solution with just about everybody strongly pushed onto Wikicities if
their content doesn't fit a current Wikimedia project. Even the new
projects proposal page strongly recommends Wikicities.
I do want to emphasis, however, that Wikibooks is not the place to do
this either. This is a need for a whole new project altogether. Are
you interested in helping me with organizing that project? The
Foundation board has talked about this issue from time to time, but
there is a need to really sit down and try to come up with the
guidelines for when a project can be started on the incubator/test wiki.
This is a policy issue rather than a technical issue. This is also
something that rather than an abstract idea, there needs to be something
written as a formal proposal with debate over the principle ideas for
how the whole process would work. Eventually it would also require a
change in the New Projects policy as well, with the ability to both
create and cull projects from the incubator Wiki.
--
Robert Scott Horning