[Foundation-l] Incubator Wiki for New Wikimedia Projects

[Robert Scott Horning]

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
>  
>
>> Wikijunior, IMHO, was "forced" upon Wikibooks, and with the plan to 
>>turn Wikijunior more into a kids version of Wikipedia, the connection 
>>with Wikibooks is far less than what it could have been in the past. 
>>    
>>
>
>Wikijunior was no more forced on Wikibooks than any other book on Wikibooks is
>forced onto that community. 
>
>-- mav
>  
>
I guess more to the point, the people who started Wikijunior are no 
longer the active participants in the project, and that it seemed to 
have been something from the Foundation board that "you must have 
Wikijunior here".  Wikijunior was never something like one of the other 
Wikibooks  It didn't start as a simple page on Wikibooks and gradually 
expand, requesting assistance from the Wikibooks community and trying to 
stay within the Wikibooks community.

Instead, Wikijunior started out as an announcement on this mailing list, 
a page on Meta that debated all kinds of philosophies and organizational 
goals of the project, and plowed into Wikibooks as a full-fledged 
project.  It didn't even start out on a standard Wikibooks bookshelf, 
but in its own seperate domain within the Wikibooks project, and still 
has some significant differences from other projects and books on 
Wikibooks.  The changes on Wikibooks to add Wikijunior were very 
arbitrary, and decisions made that hardly included any input from the 
Wikibooks community in general.

Wikijunior policies are not Wikibooks policies, and the differences 
become even more pronounced as discussions like a seperate domain and 
even a seperate Wiki for Wikijunior have been thrown arround.  Things 
like worries about pedophiles and levels of "censorship" of kid-friendly 
content make this even more pronounced as something very different from 
a normal Wikibook project.  Things like sticking to only the original 
three books and not permitting any new sections to Wikijunior are more 
examples of significant policy differences.

Wikijunior is not just another Wikibook on Wikibooks.  If the Wikibooks 
community decided to VfD Wikijunior, there would be a torrent of hate 
e-mail on this list and elsewhere that would only be equal to what 
happened to Wikiversity.  And that would have nothing to do with the 
quality of the material but because of the way that the project started. 
 Again I add that Wikibooks should not be the incubator wiki, unless 
that is precisely the role that the Wikimedia Foundation board wants it 
to become.  Wikijunior was added to Wikibooks as if Wikibooks was the 
incubator wiki, and it should have been a new project proposal on Meta 
instead.  That such proposals seemingly never get approval is a reason 
why nobody wants to throw an idea into that dustpile of ideas and 
instead try to sneak the projects through a back door like Wikijunior 
has done.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning