I've been working on a new project proposal, and I've considered trying
to demonstrate what the site would look like by creating a few wiki
pages and putting a little content together. Rather than going through
the whole hassle of trying physically setting up the website as a demo
on my own server, and because I don't have a 24/7 internet connection at
the moment, I'd like to demonstrate what I think the website could look
like by setting up some content pages demonstrating the concept.
Right now, I've put together the following page:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/WikiStandards
Before I start really pushing forward and adding content, I wanted to
ask the foundation community if this is an acceptable practice, and just
where, perhaps, I should put this content. While I started this on
Wikibooks, now that I've been reflecting on this a little bit I'm
thinking this perhaps should be on meta for now, simply because this
really is a different thing and is a project proposal.
If it is acceptable to do something like this, I'd also like some
guidelines regarding mainly how much content should be on a demo site
like this. Obviously this is something that is just starting out, but I
also don't intend to make this a working sub project either and treating
this as a fully-funtional wiki in its own right. In this case I think
it will be easier for me to explain what I am proposing by actually
showing real content and how it could be useful to the Wikimedia
community in general. If the project gets approved, it would also be a
good way to seed the new project right away.
I'm also suggesing a minor change to the new proposal policy and making
a demo project as a part of the proposal process. Obviously if there
are software changes that have to be made this can't be done on the demo
side, but a great deal can be done with the tools already available.
For most of the proposed projects, it would show if it is a serious
proposal or simply some wishful thinking that you had daydreaming one night.
--
Robert Scott Horning