I would love to see the new project process on Meta come back online. (much of this email is posted to [[m:talk:new project proposals]])
I could use some help in making this happen - we need to start an incubator process for ideas with support, and a separate process for proposing existing projects that have been incubated elsewhere for support or hosting. The meta page for each proposed project should track its progress, whether offsite or on the incubator... a project infobox should be designed... an interested group (if less formal than langcom) should go through and review the backlog of proposals and suggest the necessary next step for each.
On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 11:48 PM, Alec Conroy alecmconroy@gmail.com wrote:
You can always make Wikinfo a sister project.
A space to hold POV debates would be an interesting intermediate ground between no-restraint edit wars and topic bans, for those in heated argument. Is Wikinfo designed for this? I was thinking of something more like 'Wikireason'. There have been various proposals for an 'argument wiki' over the years, but I've never seen a working implementation.
I have actually been independently trying to think of other wikis that should be "sister projects". Some are really obvious and non-controversial--
SNPedia, for example, an encyclopedia of single nucleotide polymorphisms and related studies
Yes. Link: http://www.snpedia.com/index.php/SNPedia
Genealogy: WeRelate and Rodovid. Both remarkable and lovely projects. Combinable, if all parties could be brought together. Both could use support; I've touched on the possibility of becoming WMF projects with each, and they are willing to discuss it. The result would be by far the largest free collection of genealogy information, with support from one of the major libraries studyig and archiving related data in the US
Children's encyclopedia: WikiKids, Vikidia, Grundschulwiki, Wikimini. These projects could be coordinated better to share ideas and lessons, and could use more visibility. Some people active in these projects are already Wikimedians.
Dictionaries: OmegaWiki. This multilingual dictionary could help revamp our toolchain for Wiktionary, which remains a bit broken.
Interface translation: TranslateWiki. iirc it does not want to be a WMF project per se, but could use more explicit support than we have given so far.
Citations and bibliography: AcaWiki (and the budding WikiScholar).
Wikified maps: Wikimapia. currently profitable and popular; probably fine on their own. However they use a non-free map stack and use an NC license; finding a way to help that project migrate to a free stack and license [now that there is a free orthorectified aerial map available http://blog.stevecoast.com/im-working-at-microsoft-and-were-donating-ima] would be of benefit to the whole world.
Other projects for which there is a supply of raw materials available from content donors (which we cannot currently accept): * Annotated source materials and their translations: Part of Wikisource++ ? * Translation memory: Part of Translatewiki++ ? * Public datasets: Wikidata * Music scores: Wikimusic
We're at the point where the lack of diversity of our English language project 'styles' may be a major factor dissuading new users from participation.
It is certainly one of the factors.
Sam.