[Foundation-l] Meta:MetaProject to Overhaul Meta

[Robert Scott Horning]

Erik Moeller wrote:

>There are a few things Meta needs:
>1) Archiving historical pages as such. This is being done through
>[[Meta:Historical]]. That's not necessarily the best way of doing it,
>but it may work.
>2) Multilingual MediaWiki. This is under development. Much of the mess
>is the result of people using very different mechanisms to
>disambiguate pages in different languages.
>3) Standardized categories, standardized page hierarchies. There are
>many hierarchies which are internally consistent, but not with each
>other.
>4) Clean-up the so-called software documentation or move it to mediawiki.org.
>5) Better separation of different types of content beyond
>categorization, e.g. discussions from concrete proposals.
>
>Some of the mess also results from the organization (WMF) being in
>flux - old structures are replaced with new ones which are just now
>being created. I might also dig up my CPOV policy proposal from a long
>time ago. ;-)
>  
>

I think this is a better approach to dealing with Meta:  Helping to 
define what is Meta rather than trying to decide what should be culled 
out one piece at a time.  Meta has changed its mission over the years 
because all of the various projects have changed quite a bit over the 
years.  Things like Wikibooks and Wiktionary were afterthoughts when it 
was created, and it was originally for meta discussions about Wikipedia, 
which it still largly has and many of the major content pages on Meta 
are almost exclusively focused toward Wikipedia alone... even a strong 
emphasis about just en.wikipedia at that.  Over half of the content on 
all of the sister projects is now not even in English, and the day will 
come when over half of the Wikimedia content won't even be on Wikipedia 
(in all languages).  Meta needs to reflect these changes, but it has 
been slow to occur.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning