Erik Moeller wrote:
Part of the reason people are reluctant to be very open about certain things is that discussions can become literally endless, with no goal being achieved. So what I believe we need are clear procedures how to get community input on issues and making decisions. I hope the Wikinews case can, in some ways, serve as a precedent when it comes to starting new projects.
I'm sure others disagree, but IMO it would be better if there were not a particularly easy way to start new projects. We so far have exactly one highly successful project, from what I can tell---Wikipedia. Wiktionary has been languishing for years now in relative disuse (and in my brief attempts to use it to look up words, doesn't have enough words in it to be useful as a dictionary, driving me back to reference.com), Wikisource is still getting off the ground and is fairly disorganized, and Wikibooks has only in the last 6 months seen any books that are remotely close to being reasonable books (and even the ones labeled with 4 blocks as "complete" are still *far* short of book length and detail... we have nothing on Wikibooks that can compete with a commercial textbook). I'd rather we spent some time working on these projects we already have instead of spawning off still more projects, lest we become a clearinghouse of ideas that were started but never really carried through.
To be clear, this isn't opposition to Wikinews---I think Wikinews is a well-defined project with a clear group of users interested in working on it and minimal overlap with other projects, but I think that would be a good place to stop for now. After starting Wikinews, and counting Wikispecies, we'll have six projects---Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikispecies, and Wikisource---of which only one, Wikipedia, is really in a well-developed state.
-Mark