[Foundation-l] Community Assembly

[Andrew Gray]

2008/5/14 Chad <innocentkiller at gmail.com>:
> As I pointed out on Wikipedia Weekly earlier this week (Ep. 49 hasn't come
> out yet), the Board /must/ be involved in the creation of new projects (note:
> this is new *projects*, not new *languages*). [...]

More to the point, it'd be overkill to do it any other way

We create new projects very rarely - let's look at the past list.

2001 - Wikipedia
2002 - Wiktionary
2003 - Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikisource
2004 - *Commons, Wikispecies, Wikinews
2005 - [nothing]
2006 - Wikiversity
2007 - [nothing]
2008 - [nothing so far]

That's a total of nine projects (omitting incubator and meta, as not
really standalone projects) - and of those nine, only *one* was
founded in the last three and a half years.

Because we draw the definitions of our projects so widely, it is
generally fairly unlikely that a lot more will come along that we want
to do, and which we can't subsume into an existing project - it's
unlikely we'll create a Wikirecipies or a Wikilaw or what have you -
and so whilst I certainly don't rule out there being more, I don't
imagine we'll see many of them.

Why develop a lot of policy, a lot of structure and committees and so
on, for something that's likely to only be meaningful once every five
years or so? We can handle it by the traditional methods - a bunch of
enthusiasts get together, make a case, get more people, take it to the
Board - if and when it becomes necessary.

It may not be efficient or ideologically tidy, but it certainly beats
wasting our time creating a committee that never does anything :-)

-- 
- Andrew Gray
 andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk