2009/8/24 Andrew Turvey <andrewrturvey(a)googlemail.com>
First, if the conclusion is that no procedure exists,
a notice should be
put on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projectsstating this so that
peoples' expectations are appropriately managed.
Good idea, I added a note on the top of the page "Apart from the common
practices below, there is no official policy on closing projects".
Second, is that correct? Looking at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closure_of_He…
seems that there certainly was a procedure in the past where articles
were shifted back into the Incubator.
There is no procedure in the sense of how to reach a consensus to close the
wiki.
Moving pages to Incubator is what comes *after* the wiki is closed, to give
a future community the chance to build a new wiki at the Incubator. Imagine
if you work on a small project knowing that if the project is closed, all
your work is gone (until the wiki is opened again - which has never happened
before afaik).
Most importantly, should there be a procedure? Keeping projects open is a
drain on resources, such as removing vandalism. There
is a level of activity
below which the positive benefits of the project are outweighed by the
drain, although it's clearly not worth closing a project if the effort to do
this is not a worthwhile investment.
When looking at the recent changes and logs of several wikis proposed to be
closed, the amount of vandalism in the past year was very low.
I guess vandalism on big projects requires much more work than all those
small wikis together.
Overall, I agree with Gerard.
What I don't like is that proposals stay open for years without even being
closed as "inactive proposal for closure" (ironically).
Or, the opposite, a lot of discussion to close a relatively low-active
project in a major language. In this case, Dutch Wikinews.
----- "Gerard Meijssen" <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
From:
"Gerard Meijssen" <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Thursday, 20 August, 2009 19:01:39 GMT
+00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland,
Portugal
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Closure of projects
Hoi,
There is no procedure because what comes closest to a consensus amount to
a
lot of work. Work that does not forward our
mission one iota. The fact
that
people vote and comment is not that special,
people do ... if they vote
that
I will wear a tutu at Wikimania and a consensus
says that I should, I
still
have to volunteer to wear that tutu. It is the
same as voting for a bug
in
bugzilla. The votes are not considered so why
bother ?
As to the language committee, it does only consider new requests for
projects ... if it were to expand its services it would be in indicating
what issues exist that deal with language support that would make a
difference to the usability of our software. It would not be drinking
from
the poisoned chalice that is closing projects.
The closest we came to
expressing an opinion is that we would prefer the content of a to be
closed
project to be imported into the Incubator. This
is a not good for
Incubator
because they get dead wood loaded into their
project ....
So all in all in my opinion it is best to leave these things as is and
ignore requests for closure.
Thanks,
GerardM
2009/8/20 Huib! <Abigor(a)forgotten-beauty.com>
> Hello,
>
> I noticed that there are still a lot of open request for closure on
Meta
> so I decided to contact a LangCom member
(Robin) asking him about how
> and when the projects will be closed or when the requests will be
> closed, but I recieved a answer I didn't expected.
>
> Robin told me there was no policy (
>
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Closure_of_WMF_projects ) about the
> closure of projects so the request can stay open for always.
>
>
> I think its kind of strange that we people can make a request, that
> there are people who are voting and spending there time commenting on
> the request or even worse have stress because there project could be
> closed but the request will never be closed.
>
>
> Is there a way to change this with a new policy, or with a different
com
> for the closure, because this seems to me a
waste of time for a lot of
> people, people can stop editting projects just because the think the
> project will be closed.
>
> At this moment there are 27 request for projects to be closed, (
>
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects ) I
think
> 50% is a easy closure for keep or close. The
oldest project is from
2007
that
would mean its still open after 2 years :/
--
*Huib Laurens*
Web:
Forgotten-beauty.com <http://www.forgotten-beauty.com.com/>
Email: Abigor(a)forgotten-beauty.com <mailto:abigor@forgotten-beauty.com
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