On 07/01/2011 11:52 PM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
One thing I find irritating and complex about our
structure is the
proliferation of small wikis. Now I've no objection to the idea that
we have a wiki for every language on Earth, though where languages are
mutually intelligible such as the major dialects of English it seems
sensible to me that we combine them in one wiki - if necessary with
spelling and alphabet being subject to user preference.
But I see no reason why ten wiki, Strategy and the various wikimanias
each need their own wiki as opposed to being projects within meta.
On a broader and more radical note, why do we need separate wikis for
wikiquote, wikiversity, wikipedia wikinews and wiktionary? Surely each
of those could be separate namespaces within a language wiki?
This would make it much easier when people create an article on
wikipedia that is really a wiktionary or wikinews article as one could
just move it. It would immediately reduce the number of userpages,
watchlists and usertalk pages that one needed to maintain to one per
language (plus meta and commons). It would also foster cooperation
between editors across what are currently different projects if you
had one wiki for each language, as individual wikiprojects would now
work across what are currently quite separate news, quote and pedia
projects.
Thanks for raising this issue. Previously discussed system of redirects
and Incubator Extension [1] would help not just to the Incubator, but to
the languages with smaller amount of speakers, as well as to Meta forks.
So, instead of having numerous meta wikis, we could have just one
(Meta), with separate namespaces, which would get redirects. Thus,
namespace "Strategy:" could be
strategy.wikimedia.org; namespace
"Research" could be
research.wikimedia.org etc.
[1]
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/235020?page=last
I agree, a focus on new namespaces (perhaps with differentiated
editing permissions, per Liam) certainly looks like the best path
forward to me.
Thanks,
Richard
(User:Pharos)