Nicholas Moreau wrote:

On 6/6/06, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:

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Cormac Lawler wrote:

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Great! But is it too late to discuss the scope of this wiki? We've had discussions about having a separate wiki as an incubator for potential new Wikimedia projects (see: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikikernel or the older http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Seed_wiki). Could/will this be that wiki?

Sure, why not?

So can/should we move all of Wikiversity there? What about Wikijunior? Isn't Wikibooks just holding these until they are moved onto their own domain, therefore acting like the incubator wiki? Wouldn't it be more apposite for them to be there instead?

I'm not sure Wikijunior was originally intended to be a seperate project, actually. I'd love for it to be seperate of Wikibooks, as we do have a domain registered for it, but the WJ community opposed such a move previously.

Nick

I have been a very long time critic of the process that started Wikijunior on Wikibooks, but at the same time the opposition to moving Wikijunior was simply that a formal project proposal needed to be started, with a good number of organization questions answered before it could be moved. While these questions were answered by the individual who wanted to do the move, it really needed a larger Wikimedia user concensus before it could happen.

As far as having Wikibooks be an incubator project for new project idea, I think the defacto status of doing so has some promise, where project like Wikiversity, Wikijunior, and the Wikimania proceedings were on Wikibooks. This is a demonstration of what Wikibooks could be under one vision, but again repeated requests to formalize this philosophy and make it actual policy on Wikibooks has met considerable resistance, including from several board members (including Jimbo) who have noted that Wikibooks should not be the incubator project for Wikimedia users. As a matter of fact, Wikibooks has a explicit policy that prohibits anybody from using Wikibooks as a free webhosting service, and explicitly stated in [[b:WB:WIW]] that Wikibooks is not a site to develop new Wikimedia projects. This clause was added due to comments on this list, and concensus on Wikibooks that this was a reasonable policy.

Wikijunior and Wikiversity were on Wikibooks before this policy was created and enforced, so in effect these projects were "grandfathered" and left alone until other means were available to deal with them. With the Wikiversity sub-committee wrapping things up (a formal report will very shortly be given to the board), there is no need to move the content to an incubator wiki and then to another site again afterwards, nor move de.wikiversity to the incubator either. I would imagine that Wikijunior would go through a somewhat similar process in the next year or two eventually. With seven Wikijunior books now at a substantial level of completion, there is some real substance to work with on Wikijunior that would be the basis for a new sister project at some time in the future, not to mention that Wikijunior is also available in several different languages as well, including Chinese, French, German, and Italian.