(cross-posting to Wikimania-l and Wikimedia-l)

Hi,

As earlier discussions on this topic received relatively little response from the community, I'm sending this email to let you know about the new topic posted at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Babel#Wikimania_wikis, with regards to having a single unified Wikimania wiki.

I have copied the original post below for ease of reading. Please post your comments on the meta page.

**********

Hi. I was looking at Special:SiteMatrixhttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix and couldn't help noticing the whopping 14 separate wikis (and growing) for all the different Wikimanias, including a separate wiki for a "Wikimania team". Is there any current plans of a more sustainable or streamlined approach to running these wikis?

I am aware that this has been discussed a few times before, but no significant effort was put into it. Wikimania project domainhttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_project_domain is the most significant discussion which I could find, but participation was quite low on that, with no(?) WMF staff comments.

From what I understand from the above linked discussion, some key points against a unified Wikimania wiki was that:

1. We will not be able to preserve old Wikimania wikis as a "time capsule" 2. Older Wikimania organizers may face new organizers "steamrolling" over their pages 3. Organizers will not have complete control over the site as old admins might interrupt for whatever reasons. (or vice versa)

My though for these points was:

1. Why not have each Wikimania project branch their pages as wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016/Main page, or alternatively, have separate namespaces for each project (i.e. 2016:, 2017:, etc). We could then protect all pages under a project (i.e. 2016/ or 2016:) once a project is over. 2. This could be avoided by protection, as stated above. 3. Make it much less complicated. Once the project is over, all previous admin rights will be revoked, and the new organizers will get the rights. New admins can be advise to not modify previous project namespaces, or if better, if we can block previous projects' namespaces from editing? Furthermore, there could be a bot logging all changes made to old project namespaces, for transparency.

Is there any other views on this? Did I miss something obvious? Looking forward to your comments. Cheers, Rehman.

**********

Thanks and regards,

User:Rehmanhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rehman