[Foundation-l] When is a Wikipedia not a Wikipedia ?

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 6:46 AM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> When you go from one Wikipedia <http://wikipedia.org/> to the next, you
>  always expect an encyclopaedia. You expect things to be largely the same but
>  in a different language. According to Bugzilla bug
>  13578<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13578>,
>  this is something that will change. The Alemannic community have found that
>  having a Wikipedia, a Wikibooks, a Wiktionary and a Wikiquote is more then
>  they can chew off.
>
>  What the Alemannic community has decided is to fold all the projects into
>  their Wikipedia and have separate name spaces for the content of their old
>  projects.  Their communities seem to have

This seems perfectly acceptable to me. However, as a Wikibookian, I
can still remember the time when we were sharing server space with
Wikiversity. As an interesting piece of information, more then a few
people have suggested merging the two projects back together. I don't
want to say it's a majority opinion, but it's heard occasionally
nonetheless.

Think of this single combined project as a sort of "Alemmanic-only
Incubator". I don't think we need to restrict something like this when
it's what the Alemmanic speakers want. If they as a community want to
benefit from a dictionary and books and an encyclopedia, but don't
have the manpower to support multiple individual projects, then it
seems reasonable to combine projects together to be more managable.
The only drawback I can see, and one for which I don't attribute much
importance, is that using only one project they might not reach the
stringent localization requirements of second projects. I don't really
care about this, and we shouldn't demand more localization before we
grant them new namespaces.

My vote: let them do it.

--Andrew Whitworth