Literate Programs is a very cool and useful project, and could certainly sit well under the WMF umbrella with regards to things like NPOV and educational/informational value. But the idea of WMF subsuming another project, as opposed to starting one from the ground up, is not one I had considered before. It's not obvious to me that just because we could subsume a project with suitable qualities, we should. Are we aiming to host every such suitable project? Probably there are a good many out there that would fit with us, right?

WMF would be able to give the project sustainable hosting and exposure to a vast community. What do you think? If there is no consensus, I'd be willing to organize a community poll as we did for other projects, but I really see very little that speaks against LP becoming part of the WMF project family.

Exposure to a vast community == thinning of our existing communities, and probably mostly from already-small communities in WB, WV, WS. If LP is struggling in terms of user community, will joining WMF actually help?

Maybe I'm looking at this wrong but I'm kinda thinking, "What's in it for us?" I love Literate Programs. But it doesn't have to be part of WMF for me to love it.

I guess this also makes me think, does the WMF have goals for the projects? Aside from the Foundation level stuff like copyrights and NPOV. Wikipedia is obviously wildly successful, so let's leave it aside. Does have a position about how development of the other projects should go? If they languish in obscurity, or a rival commercial enterprise with a similar-enough aim becomes wildly popular, does that matter? Does it reflect badly on WMF if projects have to close due to lack of interest, or struggle in the beginning?

I guess it does matter, because it's hard to meet the goal of disseminating free knowledge/content if no one's ever heard of you.

Signs of success, aside from site popularity, for Wikibooks and Wikiversity are relatively clear to me - publication-level quality and use in educational institutions. Wiktionary - hmm. Wiktionary is a bit like Wikipedia, in that when it is complete enough, it will be useful enough, and it will become the standard reference on the web. Wikiquote - ???? Wikisource - ???? (similar to Wikibooks and Wikiversity?) Wikispecies - ???? (similar to Wikipedia/Wiktionary?) Wikinews - I don't know. the model for Wikinews seems sufficiently different that I can't imagine what its wild success might look like. I guess Wikinewsies might have some ideas. Commons - IMO, similar to Wikipedia/Wiktionary - standard reference on the web. MediaWiki - pretty easy, when it answers every question every type of MW user might have about it :) Meta - I guess Meta doesn't need goals.

I know WMF doesn't want to micro-manage communities, but I'd be interested to know if it considers this type of stuff its business.

cheers Brianna user:pfctdayelise

On 4/27/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:

The structure of LP is fundamentally different from any existing Wikimedia project. Yet, it is an educational project with great value. LP currently uses the MIT/X11 license, which is similar to CC-BY, but more suitable for source code; I believe this makes sense as these snippets are typically so small that they should not be encumbered further with copyleft.

The structure is different, but I could see it fitting in nicely with Wikisource for example. But surely their licencing regime would be a big problem for integration with Wikimedia? It would mean that we wouldn't be able to mix content from that project into others.

Perhaps it would be better if we just steal that extention of theirs and use it for our own purposes :)