2009/7/21 Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com:
We should leave quality.wikimedia.org in place as an object lesson to future wikifounders. "When 20 interested editors isn't enough"...
:-)
I don't think it's comparable. The Quality Portal was an attempt to drive attention towards some existing technologies and initiatives - the FlaggedRevs extension, the trust coloring demo, etc. To some extent I think it succeeded at driving constructive conversation and awareness about these possibilities. There wasn't an active push to utilize the portal on an ongoing basis, and I think it's completely fine for it to have existed as a subdomain for a while and to then be merged back into Meta.
The strategy process is a year-long, facilitated process with lots of planned outputs and deliverables. Importantly, it's also intended for people outside the existing community to give input on our five-year plan and beyond. Meta is a lovely wiki, but it's very easy to get lost, and even wading through recent changes can become pretty nightmarish if you're trying to pay attention to something specific.
The idea of a strategy wiki is more comparable, if anything, to <usability.wikimedia.org>, which seems to be working quite well to focus attention and discussion. And again, I don't think merging information back into Meta, if that turns out to be desirable, is a sign of failure; it may well be part of the natural lifecycle of such an effort. Nor do I think that there's any a priori answer to when a new wiki is or isn't appropriate.
A blank slate can help to ensure that participatory structures are understandable. I know you personally have no problems navigating the complexity of even our wildest wikis, but I don't think that the same can be said for anyone who may want to participate in this process. A purpose-built wiki with no other focus than this process can help to make things more understandable, accessible, searchable, and ultimately useful, and perhaps can also help to escape groupthink by making purposes and structures more immediately understandable to people who aren't part of the club.
Another reason to consider a new wiki is that it makes it easier to roll-out specific extensions that we want to consider using for this process. Philippe has been looking at various talk page extensions, for example, and we may consider using one of them to make the discussion process more accessible to wiki-newbies. Again, that's easy to experiment with if you're using a new wiki, but much harder with all the existing structures and content of a site like Meta in place.