[Foundation-l] Following the conventions: seperating Wikisource

Mohamed Magdy mohamed.m.k at gmail.com
Tue Jun 5 01:12:22 UTC 2007


The issue:

http://wikisource.org is supposed to be a portal, a portal with links to 
the different versions of the project. just like all the other projects, 
the main domain a portal..the sub-domains contains the different 
versions..except for the multilingual projects (commons + meta) which 
don't have any sub-domains and have their main pages in English as 
default and main pages in many other languages. so commons.wikimedia.org 
or meta.wikimedia.org are considered to be the 'portals' or better..they 
don't have portals (all content on one wiki) or there are no 
metawiki.org or commonswiki.org so they don't have a portal and that is 
of course made intentionally (they don't need that ball surrounded by 
languages)..

When we look at Wikisource, we find it somehow disorganized..first..the 
new languages are created inside wikisource.org wiki (which as I know 
was once an oldwikisource) until they accumulate some unknown number of 
pages then they move to their own sub-domain.. isn't that the exact 
purpose of the incubator? develop the language to some extent to test 
its potential?

Other ideas say that Wikisource project is special somehow that some of 
the languages will never be big enough (text collections, contributors 
etc...) to deserve its own domain or there will never  be enough 
community for it..and because of that they are better placed in one 
place (I don't really see the objection of making new sub-domains or 
wikis, does it cost?) ..so, following the conventions, as Wikisource 
does contain sub-domains, the address http://wikisource.org should be 
made only a portal..not a Wiki! and the Multilingual collections (that 
didn't get a sub-domain and probably will never in the near future) be 
placed on a sub-domain of wikisource.org, perhaps 
multi.wikisource.org..not the current mix..having both the portal and 
the multilingual wiki on the same place.. that is a solution..other 
solution would be to move all the content on the wiki that shouldn't 
exist on wikisource.org to the incubator and remove that wiki and just 
add the portal like the other projects..but I seriously doubt if the 
languages will get out of the incubator...in any solution, these 
languages and cultures should be featured,  the ignorance of myself to 
certain language doesn't make it less or bad..

Now I feel that I wrote much to describe ;)




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