[Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia Communs

[Toby Bartels]

[I apologise if you receive this twice.
 The mail bounced back to me reporting delivery failure,
 and the post doesn't show up on the archives.]

Erik Moeller (Eloquence) wrote in large part:

>If you can convince the others (vote, consensus etc.) that we should set
>up a blank wiki now and add all the other functionality later, regardless
>of all the problems that may ensue, then I will follow along, but my
>position remains that we should properly plan and develop a basic set of
>features before publicly launching this project with great fanfare, to
>make sure that we have a solid foundation to build on, and that we get the
>greatest possible interest in the important early stage of content
>development.

I was saying earlier that it'd be nice to have the thing around,
even before it really gets the software features that it needs.
But I agree that it would be rather anticlimactic to advertise it,
just to have people discover that it really isn't that neat (yet).
Erik, your stories of disaster awaiting us make more sense now.

So perhaps the solution is to launch it ''without'' great fanfare???

Let's be very clear that founding the blank wiki now is a trial run,
with problems that we expected all along and have plans to fix. 
This is very much in the spirit of Wikipedia's own founding,
so I believe that folks will understand.


-- Toby