Dear community,

after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Wikipedia was overwhelmed by people expressing their sympathy for the victims, adding material about affected organizations, and generally flooding us with content that was inappropriate. Rather than turning these people away, the decision was made to set up a separate wiki, sep11.wikipedia.org, which still exists today.

A poll on Meta for closing the project showed 104 people in support and 6 people in opposition. A volunteer, Jeff Merkey, has offered to host the content under a dedicated domain name, sep11memories.org, in a read-only state. It will from then onward be completely separate from the Wikimedia Foundation.

Before we make this move, I would like to call all volunteers to help review the state of the wiki. Remove comments or pages which are inappropriate, remove inappropriate references to Wikipedia which suggest an ongoing association (pointing out the historical association is fine), and so on. An alternative logo would also be helpful; otherwise the logo will have to be turned off.

To help, do the following:

1) Create an account on http://sep11.wikipedia.org/ 2) Add yourself to the "Cleanup Group" on http://sep11.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_Portal 3) Start working. :-) If you need admin rights, leave a note on my talk page (User:Eloquence).

I hope people will help. I believe our own project history is important and deserves respect and attention, even if we decide that a project is not within the scope of the Wikimedia Foundation, and especially when dealing with a subject such as this.

I would suggest a cleanup period of 4 weeks at most. Remember, this is not a call for reviving the project and adding new information (though new navigation structure is fine), but to get it into a state where it can exist as a separate, valuable resource.