Dan
I've not seen any proposals involving shutting down projects without
community involvement, so hopefully you shouldn't
need to worry about this.
The problem with failing projects like Wikinews and Wikiversity is that
there is not a critical mass in their community. I wouldn't go so far as
to say there is no community, but for all practical purposes that might as
well be true. In such cases there isn't a realistic prospect of community
involvement and the WMF needs to decide how to manage that situation on on
of their projects. A small investment to set up a user group to own the
new project under a new brand, move the content off the WMF servers,
removing the Wikim/pedia branding on the way, and maybe pay a few years
hosting charges as a sign of goodwill seems the right way to go.
JPS