If merging existing wikis is resource intensive, lets start the process by not creating new wikis for thins that should be projects within existing wikis. So wikimania 2012, or if it is too late for that Wikimania 2013 could be a project within meta.
But my suspicion is that a bit of development and the adding of appropriate suffixes would make merger of wikis straightforward - and worth doing as this would go a long way towards encouraging collaboration across wikis and making the whole operation more understandable and functional.
Remember the concept of the wisdom of crowds rather relies on there being crowds, so the more we hive things off into standalone wikis the more we undermine the essence that makes this place work.
WSC
Message: 5 Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2011 22:56:43 -0700 From: Alec Conroy alecmconroy@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Merge wikis To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: CA+Gi05DLGhp+nxoPciGxQ_QqECpGVtKQ0d-j3f92=LFSGsPeZA@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
That discussion was interesting for this one, because it brings up issues such as that merging even a relatively small wiki like ten (565 content pages, 3,204 total pages) into Meta would probably take some considerable work.
We need to lower barriers to cross-project collaboration. A SUL-linked userspace and crossproject transclusion will be a good first start. We ultimately want to be in a place where merges can be done with only trivial effort.
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