[Foundation-l] Wikimedia mouvement

[Michael Snow]

Florence Devouard wrote:
> Hardly.
>
> Meta is mostly a work-environment. Transforming it to be a rather public 
> site would damage its own current role.
>
> WikimediaFoundation wiki would fit that role better. However, there is 
> much more to the Wikimedia mouvement than just the Foundation.
>
> Currently, we do have a private wiki playing that role. That's 
> internalwiki. The new site would simply be the public version of internal.
>   
I'm not especially clear on what the boundaries are here. Meta is a work 
environment, I suppose, but it's also public in various senses. Most 
notably, right now, it's the place where information about the board 
election is presented. What damage do you envision this doing to Meta's 
current role?

My inclination is to view Meta, much like Commons, as a project 
primarily to serve the rest of the larger movement. That means it may 
end up hosting a mixture of things, depending on what is needed. These 
areas may still develop a distinct community of their own, but I'm 
concerned about a tendency to exclude matters from their scope when they 
have legitimate value to the movement and no other obvious home. 
Deletionism is tricky enough in our projects whose scope is more clearly 
limited.

Opening up wikimediafoundation.org to more people, in conjunction with 
flagged revisions, is another possibility that's been suggested a few 
times. That may be good, although I agree it may not be sufficient and 
this is broader than just the foundation. But I'm not sure about the 
value of throwing more wikis at the issue, be they public or private, 
freely editable or more limited.

--Michael Snow