2009/8/24 Andrew Turvey andrewrturvey@googlemail.com
First, if the conclusion is that no procedure exists, a notice should be put on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projectsstating this so that peoples' expectations are appropriately managed.
Good idea, I added a note on the top of the page "Apart from the common practices below, there is no official policy on closing projects".
Second, is that correct? Looking at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closure_of_Her... seems that there certainly was a procedure in the past where articles were shifted back into the Incubator.
There is no procedure in the sense of how to reach a consensus to close the wiki. Moving pages to Incubator is what comes *after* the wiki is closed, to give a future community the chance to build a new wiki at the Incubator. Imagine if you work on a small project knowing that if the project is closed, all your work is gone (until the wiki is opened again - which has never happened before afaik).
Most importantly, should there be a procedure? Keeping projects open is a
drain on resources, such as removing vandalism. There is a level of activity below which the positive benefits of the project are outweighed by the drain, although it's clearly not worth closing a project if the effort to do this is not a worthwhile investment.
When looking at the recent changes and logs of several wikis proposed to be closed, the amount of vandalism in the past year was very low. I guess vandalism on big projects requires much more work than all those small wikis together.
Overall, I agree with Gerard.
What I don't like is that proposals stay open for years without even being closed as "inactive proposal for closure" (ironically). Or, the opposite, a lot of discussion to close a relatively low-active project in a major language. In this case, Dutch Wikinews.
----- "Gerard Meijssen" gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
From: "Gerard Meijssen" gerard.meijssen@gmail.com To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Thursday, 20 August, 2009 19:01:39 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland,
Portugal
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Closure of projects
Hoi, There is no procedure because what comes closest to a consensus amount to
a
lot of work. Work that does not forward our mission one iota. The fact
that
people vote and comment is not that special, people do ... if they vote
that
I will wear a tutu at Wikimania and a consensus says that I should, I
still
have to volunteer to wear that tutu. It is the same as voting for a bug
in
bugzilla. The votes are not considered so why bother ?
As to the language committee, it does only consider new requests for projects ... if it were to expand its services it would be in indicating what issues exist that deal with language support that would make a difference to the usability of our software. It would not be drinking
from
the poisoned chalice that is closing projects. The closest we came to expressing an opinion is that we would prefer the content of a to be
closed
project to be imported into the Incubator. This is a not good for
Incubator
because they get dead wood loaded into their project ....
So all in all in my opinion it is best to leave these things as is and ignore requests for closure. Thanks, GerardM
2009/8/20 Huib! Abigor@forgotten-beauty.com
Hello,
I noticed that there are still a lot of open request for closure on
Meta
so I decided to contact a LangCom member (Robin) asking him about how and when the projects will be closed or when the requests will be closed, but I recieved a answer I didn't expected.
Robin told me there was no policy ( http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Closure_of_WMF_projects ) about the closure of projects so the request can stay open for always.
I think its kind of strange that we people can make a request, that there are people who are voting and spending there time commenting on the request or even worse have stress because there project could be closed but the request will never be closed.
Is there a way to change this with a new policy, or with a different
com
for the closure, because this seems to me a waste of time for a lot of people, people can stop editting projects just because the think the project will be closed.
At this moment there are 27 request for projects to be closed, ( http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects ) I
think
50% is a easy closure for keep or close. The oldest project is from
2007
that would mean its still open after 2 years :/
-- *Huib Laurens*
Web: Forgotten-beauty.com http://www.forgotten-beauty.com.com/ Email: Abigor@forgotten-beauty.com <mailto:abigor@forgotten-beauty.com
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