[Foundation-l] Re: Proposing New Projects (was Proposal for a newproject: Wikisomething--repost)

[Brion Vibber]

Robin Shannon wrote:
> I think one of the reasons that new proposals have trouble getting up
> is because most of the new proposal ideas just aren't suitable for
> wikis. Wikis are not the be all and end all of user driven websites.
> There are many, many different paradigms (forums, blogs etc), wikis
> are just one of those paradigms. Just  because wikis worked well for
> the 'pedia doesn't mean they are going to work well for other things.
> I have said it before and i will porbably say it again: we need a
> discussion about the future of wikimedia. Are we in the 'buisness' of
> wikis, or are we in the 'buisness' of making the sum of human
> knowledge avaliable to everyone? If it is the former, we need more
> info on the "propose a new project page" about the limitations of
> wikis. If it is the latter, then we need some more software tools than
> just mediawiki.

Well we already have some projects that are very poorly suited to a wiki
format such as:
* Wiktionary
* Wikiquote
* Wikimedia Commons

and some which would greatly benefit from application-specific workflow,
organization and navigation tools which we don't really have:
* Wikibooks
* Wikisource
* Wikinews

Our software was written for Wikipedia; our development team has
primarily gotten into it from and for Wikipedia, and we haven't really
seen much specialized software development coming from the communities
for these other projects.

There are a few things: a MediaWiki extension for Wikinews which
provides basic support for the category-based, time-sorted article lists
it needs, a couple upload helper apps for Commons. There's a little bit
of code which might one day form part of the support for Ultimate
Wiktionary. But the basic software platform we're running these sites on
isn't tuned for them, and in some cases it's really totally inappropriate.

I would generally recommend against tossing in _yet more_ different new
projects when our existing ones are so poorly supported, without a
better idea of who's going to support them and with what.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 253 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/attachments/20050924/2f15cba3/attachment-0001.pgp