Wait, let me get this straight.
You think it makes sense to require 5 users pledged to start a Wiki when our 3rd biggest Wiki, the Japanese Wikipedia, wouldn'tve met this requirement itself, and the German Wikipedia would not have until its second month of existance?
Requiring such reports will dangerously inhibit the growth of new Wikipedias and will cause the rate of abandonment of new Wikis to skyrocket. Plenty of people may be committed to translating articles to their language, but you are adding heaps of new work that is just going to make people less and less willing.
And regarding the fourth point, ARE YOU CRAZY!?!!!!?!!?!?! Turn off the Wiki software do to "no or very little editing" in the past month? These four criteria alone could put all of our existing, thriving Wikipedias except for most of those with over 1000 articles and a minority of those with under 1000 out of commission for a long time to come! The Kannada Wikipedia for example is in an Indic language which represents an area of much-needed growth for us, and is growing steadily. However, the number of edits outside the MediaWiki namespace per day is steadily decreasing, not due to people losing interest but due to people having decided to make a couple of extreme contributions per month instead of a hundred tiny ones.
If any of these measures get passed, the fork which I previously mentioned and was serious about pursuing but not too enthusiastic about will really become a priority and I will put lots of time and effort into it, and it may well attract other Wikipedians shocked at new linguistically-opressive policies.
These suggestions are dangerous to the very nature of Wikipedia as a whole!!!
node'
On Mon, 01 Nov 2004 22:11:27 +0100, Elisabeth Bauer elian@djini.de wrote:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Evan Prodromou evan@wikitravel.org wrote:
On Wikitravel, this is the deal: 1. There needs to be at least 5 users pledged to start up the wiki. 2. There needs to be one contact person for the new wiki. 3. The contact person has to make a monthly report about the state of the wiki: what's been happening, advances, debates, changes in policy or guidelines, etc. 4. If there's no or very little editing on the wiki for a month, or if the reports stop coming in, or if generally the thing just starts winding down, the wiki goes inactive. We turn off the wiki software, and make the content available in case someone else wants to use it.
Requiring a translated interface up-front might also be a good idea. It would show that at least one person is very commited.
Not necessarily. It could be done during the founding period. It's definitely more fun to work on the interface when already the first contributions happen than to do all the work alone beforehand.
Evan's four points sound very sensible to me, especially the point with the contact person and the reports. From some of our wikis we know exactly nothing or hear only from them when serious problems appear. A short monthly report would be very helpful there.
I put this stuff on the agenda for the next public board meeting: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_agenda
greetings, elian
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