Dear colleague, What you say makes absolute sence. I have the suspicion that there was a time, around 2009, that new activities in WMF were eager to have a wiki of its own: Strategy, Outreach and so on. Alas, after a while of retention, there came Ten wiki. The intention was to have a website for the public, but I don't believe in creating again and again more and more communication channels. I see the same tendency in WMNL, by the way. About the sister projects such as Wiktionary and Wikisource: there is ALS.WP doing that already, maybe knowing that it would be hard to create thoses sister projects in ALS (Alemannic). In general I would like to see more bounds between the sisters, including Wikipedia. We had that discussion with regard to a rebranding, going under the name of Wikipedia only and have a Wikipedia Foundation, a Wikipedia dictionary (Wiktionary), a Wikipedia Text Books (Wikibooks) and so on. But in those sister projects communities, I have met fierce resistance to any new branding or technical rearrangement. They even tend to avoid to associate themselves with Wikipedia. They want to grow on their own appeal and strengh. (They also are annoyed when Wikipedians come to a sister project and don't learn immediately that the rules differ.) Kind regards Ziko van Dijk 2011/7/1 WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com>om>: -- Ziko van Dijk The Netherlands http://zikoblog.wordpress.com/

On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 7:14 PM, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk(a)googlemail.com> wrote: I don't second that. Also we need to consolidate the brand Wikimedia. I wrote in this list about that and made some mockups but had no feedback.[0] :( [0] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-December/063014.html

I couldn't agree more, now that the date has passed, so should ten.wikipedia. Outreach and Strategy have a mission, but nothing so distinct that it would be out of scope on Meta, and combining those three projects would reduce the overhead in time and process required to maintain all three/four wikis. On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 6:24 PM, Tom Morris <tom(a)tommorris.org> wrote:

Yes, by all means, let's fold some of the different wikis back into one. Every day I seem to bump into a new wiki which someone is expecting me to keep track of. The proliferation of different wikis creates confusion, frustration and generally sub-optimal user journeys. Also, if it was possible to use access levels in a more sophisticated way, we could further reduce the number of wikis we are expected to remember... Chris WMUK

There are much more "meta-wikis" that could be merged: <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_wikis#Organizational_and_planning_projects> Ziko van Dijk, 02/07/2011 00:14: And with good reason. See also <http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal_talk:Brand_name_consolidation> (this is a perennial proposal). Nemo

Hi Nemo, you are not very specific - the discussion on Strategory you are linking to contains a lot of good reasons provided by Dedalus. Indeed, if you talk to the press, or to media experts, they all know "Wikipedia" but not "Wikimedia". The most simple and reasonable way is to use the famous brand, not to invest in "Wikimedia". With regard to the sister projects, I feel a lot of vigorous emotions but no arguments. Ziko 2011/7/2 Federico Leva (Nemo) &lt;nemowiki(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: -- Ziko van Dijk The Netherlands http://zikoblog.wordpress.com/

On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 3:34 PM, . Courcelles &lt;courcelleswiki(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: Just to speak about tenwiki... There has been an open discussion since March (no rush to close) about what to do with the site.[1] You're all welcome to participate in that if you have an opinion about what to do. 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. Best regards, Steven 1. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ten/wiki/WP:VP#Ideas_for_what_to_do_…

A bot could do it, but that's not completely relevent. On Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 2:48 PM, Steven Walling &lt;steven.walling(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote:

On Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 22:48, Steven Walling &lt;steven.walling(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: With tenwiki, as with the older Wikimania wikis, there doesn't seem much point in merging them into Meta. Just leave 'em once they are done, but Outreach and Strategy are continuing and it'd be a lot easier if they could just be part of Meta. Plus, the "tenth anniversary year" of Wikipedia is still rolling, and the tenth anniversary of Wikipedias in Polish, Afrikaans, Norwegian and Esperanto are coming up this year. -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/> Please don't print this e-mail out unless you want a hard copy of it. If you do, go ahead. I won't stop you. Nor will I waste your ink/toner with 300+ lines of completely pointless and legally unenforceable cargo cult blather about corporate confidentiality.

Within the general concept of Merging Wikis I agree, it would be good in principle to have one uber-wiki that is the central hub of all community things (meta, outreach, strategy...). Each time we create a separate wiki Ward Cunningham kills a kitten. I wonder - would it be possible in MediaWiki to make it possible for User accounts to be given read/edit permissions to different areas of the Wiki. If that were possible (which I'm sure is a common request from MediaWiki's Corporate users) then we would also be able to merge InternalWiki, CheckuserWiki, ChapComWiki to this uber-wiki. The WMF would also be able to merge their OfficeWiki, BoardWiki, and WikimediaFoundation.org. I'm sure that many Chapters also run at least two Wikis - one for the public and one for their elected Board. Personally would like to this new uber-wiki be hosted at * http://www.wikimedia.org/* (rather than Meta) which is currently just a placeholder that points to all of the projects. Other relevant additions to MediaWiki would be having universal watchlists and universal User/UserTalk pages as well as the ability (which is coming in LiquidThreads v.3<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/LiquidThreads_3.0>) to Watchlist specific individual threads in talkpages. On a separate note, have we had a discussion recently about the name "Wikimedia Commons" and whether it would be a good idea to simply call it "WikiCommons" to make it consistent with the rest of the projects? Or, is this a perennial proposal? From what I understand, the reason that it was called that Wikimedia Commons originally was that was created to be a "service project" for the Wikipedia language editions and was not expected to be considered a "sister project" alongside WikiSource, WikiNews, WikiBooks... Now that it definitely IS a sister project, do you think it is a good idea to rename it? I note that a lot of people who reuse our multimedia are attributing it as coming from WikiCommons already anyway (google news search for the term<http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned… example.) -Liam wittylama.com/blog Peace, love & metadata

Am 02.07.11 14:17 schrieb Alec Conroy: I beg your pardon, but Ziko and WereSpielChequers are absolutely right here. You won't manage to introduce another brand name after ten years of Wikipedia. Even if you tried, it would be to no avail. It was a huge mistake to introduce the sister projects under a different brand and to keep them apart from Wikipedia proper. After all, it did not foster creativity and diversity, but it rather split the movement into parts irreconcilable. Regards, Jürgen.

On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 2:40 AM, Milos Rancic &lt;millosh(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I agree, a focus on new namespaces (perhaps with differentiated editing permissions, per Liam) certainly looks like the best path forward to me. Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos)

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 1:02 AM, John Vandenberg &lt;jayvdb(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: [snip] Clarify: I mean new namespaces are the best way forward for our Meta-type content ("Strategy:", "Outreach:", "Research:", etc). Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos)

Right now, we're host to an assortment of projects, a collection of communities more than a single community. If we want to grow-- if we want to become a coherent global movement with a coherent global community, we need to work on reducing these inter-project barriers. There are two very different strategies for how to do that. The first strategy is to merge whenever possible. Try to designate/create a global space for ANYTHING meta, movement, or user-space style social content. So, for example, instead of being forced maintain multiple users pages, a user could have a single 'central' user page on the uberproject. (if they chose). But there is another way we could do this. This second strategy is to keep separate things separate, but to reduce barriers across the 'separate' projects. Instead of fully merging, we just make it much much easier to 'connect' across projects. So, for example, creating a central set of global, multilingual templates that can be 'pulled' into any project. Two different strategies in two different directions. To succeed, we're going to need them both.

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 07:02, John Vandenberg &lt;jayvdb(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: There are two types of Wikimedia projects: those which could be reasonably treated as extensions of Wikipedia and those which couldn't be. For example, Wiktionary (as it is presently) and Wikibooks are obvious extensions of Wikipedia: If you need shorter definitions, more philological than encyclopedic, you would put that in the form of dictionary. If you need to write in depth about some topic, you would use the form of book. Wikisource and Wikiversity couldn't be treated as an extension of Wikipedia, as they assume a type of work different from Wikipedia: Wikisource gathers texts as they are, while Wikiversity has to question even basic principles of Wikipedia, as it indents to be an academic project. Wikinews is in the middle. Creating news have different dynamics from creating the articles, but Wikipedians are keeping news up to date, although it is not the primary purpose of Wikipedia. So, a small community could benefit from having Wiktionary and Wikibooks inside of their Wikipedia. At the other side, the same community would benefit more if it has technological and methodological support from Multilingual Wikisource. LangCom's proposal is on that line, but I am not sure has it been verbalized publicly.

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 8:39 AM, Alec Conroy &lt;alecmconroy(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: A rebranding like this could be launched in tandem with the next significant project launch or makeover. Right. S.

It could be done though if given it's own namespace, and Wikipedia would definitely benefit. +1 In the topic area I work there are a lot of contributors writing content that is vastly more suited to Wikinews. A News: namespace would be really interesting; but of course it's unfair to step on the toes of a fledgling project. But perhaps in hindsight it should have been launched as a namespace. Tom

On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 19:27, Arlen Beiler &lt;arlenbee(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I don't think that you've understood the idea properly. Redirects + Incubator Extension would allow to xyz.wikipedia.org to have virtually separate project xyz.wikibooks.org. Yes, they would share the same admins (if they want that), their "global" RecentChanges and other technical benefits from having one project, but they would be also separate projects, with their own dynamics. So, you could write poetry inside of the special namespace "Poetry:" if you want and it wouldn't interfere with encyclopedic articles. So, as it wouldn't be a technical issue, the things about we need to think are social. For example, it is not a technical problem to have Wikisource as a virtual project inside of one Wikipedia, it is just more sane to put it on Multilingual Wikisource because there are people who know how OCR and proofreading processes should be implemented. Similarly to that, having Wikiversity as virtual project inside of one Wikipedia would be harmful for both small groups: in the sense of editorial policies, Wikipedia has to follow strict rules, Wikiversity mustn't follow strict rules; which would create confusion inside of one small community. Wikinews is in between based on how serious the work on news would be done. If it is dominated by short news about current events, virtual project inside of Wikipedia would be good enough. However, if there is a serious group of journalists, which want to work on other journalistic forms, like interviews are, for example, then they should have a separate project. And, again, it is not because of technical issues, but because of different approaches.