Andrew Lih a écrit:
On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 16:59:32 +0200, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Actually, a new project has legal, monetary and logistical issues attached.
This argument could be made for nearly anything under the Wikimedia umbrella, so it would be best to define explicit scope and procedures.
I think I already answered to this a bit, but I'll suggest more. If we just toss the future content of wikispecies in wikipedia, as far as we are concerned (wmf) that is a bland operation (though I suspect someone will tell me that this should not be bland, but blank, or invisible, or whatever).
If we create a new project, say htt://www.wikispecies.org (to simplify) and that this project is multilingual, then we will also probably have http://en.wikispecies.org http://fr.wikispecies.org http://zh.wikispecies.org etc...
Up to possibly 50 or more adresses to manage.
Also, we'll have to purchase http://www.wikispecies.us http://www.wikispecies.pl http://www.wikispecies.net etc...
Up to how many countries in the world.
This is not free.
If we toss everything in wikipedia, we do not have to adapt the wiki software, or we have to tweak the adaptation, so make current functionning of wikipedia more complicated.
If we make a new project with specific requirements, we have to make changes to Mediawiki. And we need people technically available to do it. And we need people to be interested to do it.
Since it is a specialised wiki, could we not foresee that a foundation somewhere might be interested by this very specialised and scientific project, and envision specifically making a donation so as to push these modifications ?
This project was initiated by a non wikipedian and rejoined by wikipedians as far as I understood. Wiki space... I think little discussion occured on wikispace It was mostly on this mailing list, on meta and on irc.
This has been a continuing problem with Wikipedia/media projects. Multiple communications channels are great for grassroots collaboration for content, but it's not good for due process. As Mav mentioned, I did not find it mentioned on Meta Goings on and Wikimedia News at all. If it was there, I think there would be much less problem with the decision. We should be able to improve on this.
Incidentely, I am glad to discover so many people were unhappy not to see it on the goings on. I was of the opinion that this page was hardly read, so less and less motivated to update it regularly. This is a joy to discover that the information was felt missing here. I consequently suggest an extra effort on this one :-)