Hi all,
When I thought about some of the latest discussions on the list and
meta-wiki here, I had a little crazy idea.
The Wikimedia Foundation website was created a few months ago because we
wanted something clean and clear to present to outside visitors. People
shouldn't have to dive in the mess on meta-wiki for getting information
about Wikimedia.
However, this plan didn't work out in my opinion. WMF wiki isn't
regularly updated, people aren't sure what should be on meta and what on
wmf, content is duplicated on meta-wiki, translations have to be
regularly moved from meta to the wmf wiki and so on.
In my opinion, there are three options:
* we can continue like this and try to make the best out of it
* we can drastically reduce the number of pages on WMF, limit the
translations and make it a very simple information site (similar to what
was done on
http://www.wikimedia.de, the german associations site)
* or we can reunify meta-wiki and the WMF wiki under
http://www.wikimedia.org
Before some of you call now "impossible", I'd like you to think about
it. We've managed to build an encyclopedia which is visited by thousands
of people daily in a wiki. Of course, sometimes you find goatze on the
main page - that's wikipedia. If an open wiki is acceptable for the most
famous encyclopedia on the internet, it isn't for the little
organization behind? Do we really need a classical website, with all its
failures? Can't we just be proud of what we do and say: Yes, we build an
encyclopedia in a wiki - and our organisation website is a wiki, too.
and as wikipedia proves, you can organize a wiki in a way that visitors
are able to find the stuff they want to know - professional looking
mainpage etc. It just has to be done, and I think the community of
wikimedians which is populating meta-wiki is now big enough to do this.
Important and official pages can be protected, inofficial opinion
pages can be marked with templates...
If we want something not to be known, it should be done in a closed wiki
anyway - as the google case has shown, the press isn't able to
differentiate anyway between something said officially on the WMF
website and something on a page on meta. There are multiple ways to make
clear what is official or not, to lead the press to specifically
dedicated pages while also providing different information for the wiki
experienced community. And if a reporter finds the "List of wikipedians
by favoured ice-cream flavour", so what? that's our community.
Test wikipedias would be moved from meta to somewhere else, as well as
the mediawiki documentation (there is now a dedicated mediawiki wiki) to
not clutter up recentchanges anymore.
Unifying meta and wmf would also help to bridge the slowly growing gap
between the community and the organisation Wikimedia. Since Wikimedia
depends on the work of volunteers, I see this as a rather dangerous
thing. It more and more becomes "they and us" while it should be
"we".
Last but not least I have to admit, that I feel that there are simply
too many wikis and websites to keep track. On my list (incomplete):
* german wikipedia, english wikipedia, commons, mediawiki wiki,
developer wiki, meta-wiki, german board wiki, german wikimedia website,
wikimedia foundation website, chapter wiki, grants wiki (as good as
closed), otrs
So, I propose this for consideration and for discussing the idea to
death, as usual ;-)
greetings,
elian
An excellent analysis with good ideas. However, I sense a general
feeling of apathy about these matters, so I expect to see little done.
The situation is quite bizarre - there are probably around a dozen
different sites or pages of sites giving information about Wikimedia
and the MediaWiki software. Some have been abandoned and some haven't.
It's practically impossible to tell which is correct and up-to-date,
and which is fossil.
Part of this is of course down to the fact that if anyone did try and
change anything, someone else would revert straight away. It's a bit
like instruction creep: people have added their own little sites and
ideas on how things should be over time, and now we have the sprawling
network outlined above.
Possibly the only group with enough clout to resolve this issue is the board.
Dan