[Foundation-l] Community Assembly

[Pharos]

On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 12:50 PM, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Isn't that a sign of stagnation?

There is no structured process for considering new proposals, nor even
a way to archive proposals without community support.

And yet there remain categories of knowledge, and established genres
of reference books in print, that are not yet represented in the
Wikimedia projects.  For example, an annotated bibliography of all
subjects, or a 'dictionary of allusion' of subjects treated in
cultural expression (a replacement for "in popular culture...").

But I would not think of proposing any such projects with the current
non-system, where they stand little to no chance of actually being
implemented.

Some new projects might well eventually be implemented as
"subprojects", like Wikijunior on Wikibooks.  Indeed, I'm personally
of the opinion that some of our existing projects might benefit by
being merged, and I feel this should be an issue for a community
structure to consider as well.

Of course, Board approval would be required for new projects as well.

Thanks,
Pharos