Kelly Martin wrote:
Indeed, the proper response to the lower profile of the other projects is to advertise them more heavily, not to submerge them further.
This may or may not be off topic, but one thing we are terrible at is cross-project community support. The submerged projects are largely our own doing. Mostly this is because most editors are (and I mean this factually, not disparagingly) wrapped up in their own work and project, and not necessarily connected to the wider Wikimedia mission or free content, and not well-acquainted with the other projects. From my perspective as a dual Wiktionarian and Wikipedian, I would say a huge proportion of Wikipedia articles that could have crossproject templates (i.e. {{wiktionary}}), which is most of the non-proper noun, non-phrase articles (100s K?) lack them. There is virtually no use of internal linking between the projects, even though it is [[wikt:easy|]], as easy as linking to another namespace. We should link all technical terms, and lists of terms, phrases, etc., from Wikipedia to Wiktionary instead; whereas now we have crappy stub articles or neverending terms lists on them, we could have more more useful dictionary articles, which affords etymologies, parts of speech, dictionary-style citations, audio pronunciations, and translations.
Unfortunately, all my attempts to do so so far have ironically met with people branding me a deletionist and vigorously defending their article on *their* project, with no concept of the parallel goals of projects like Wiktionary. People know Wiktionary is a wiki, but it's a foreign project to them. Transwiki should be a *process* not a deletion process, and instead of throwing things in the perceived trash heap of other projects, transwikied content should be integrated into Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia lends almost no manpower to helping with the cleanup of (massive amounts of) stuff transferred to Wiktionary, and consequently, it mostly languishes without entering the main namespace. This isn't all Wikipedia's fault: Wiktionary has never really made any internal effort to take on the transwiki process, and also lacks the equivalent {{wikipedia}} templates on most relevant articles, and furthermore, has increasingly been becoming more receptive of encyclopedic content. My suggestions to get rid of encyclopedic entries like placenames, brand names, names of TV shows, etc., have met with similar "inclusionist" resistance, when every failed search of those points the reader to the more useful Wikipedia article. ("Perhaps there is an article [[X]] in our sister encyclopedia project, Wikipedia.")
While I love the identities of both projects, we need to find a way to do that without making them foreign to each other, as that is a very bad way of promoting our long-term goals.
Dominic