On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 12:50 PM, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
2008/5/14 Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com:
As I pointed out on Wikipedia Weekly earlier this week (Ep. 49 hasn't come out yet), the Board /must/ be involved in the creation of new projects (note: this is new *projects*, not new *languages*). [...]
More to the point, it'd be overkill to do it any other way
We create new projects very rarely - let's look at the past list.
2001 - Wikipedia 2002 - Wiktionary 2003 - Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikisource 2004 - *Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews 2005 - [nothing] 2006 - Wikiversity 2007 - [nothing] 2008 - [nothing so far]
That's a total of nine projects (omitting incubator and meta, as not really standalone projects) - and of those nine, only *one* was founded in the last three and a half years.
Isn't that a sign of stagnation?
There is no structured process for considering new proposals, nor even a way to archive proposals without community support.
And yet there remain categories of knowledge, and established genres of reference books in print, that are not yet represented in the Wikimedia projects. For example, an annotated bibliography of all subjects, or a 'dictionary of allusion' of subjects treated in cultural expression (a replacement for "in popular culture...").
But I would not think of proposing any such projects with the current non-system, where they stand little to no chance of actually being implemented.
Some new projects might well eventually be implemented as "subprojects", like Wikijunior on Wikibooks. Indeed, I'm personally of the opinion that some of our existing projects might benefit by being merged, and I feel this should be an issue for a community structure to consider as well.
Of course, Board approval would be required for new projects as well.
Thanks, Pharos