[Foundation-l] Community Assembly

[Lars Aronsson]

> On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 12:50 PM, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> > We create new projects very rarely - let's look at the past list.

Pharos wrote:
> Isn't that a sign of stagnation?

No, it is not.  Within each of these nine projects, new 
encyclopedic articles, new news reports, new books, new quotations 
are created every day.  As well as new categories of encyclopedic 
articles, new portals, new WikiProjects.  Each of these is a 
"project" in its own right, managed over a long time by one or 
more individuals.  But they don't need their own domain names and 
logotypes because they are able to fit within the structure of 
these nine projects.

A few proposals have been put forth, that don't fit, e.g. Wikicat 
and Wikidata, that noone succeeded to bring to reality so far.  
Some similar open content projects have developed outside of the 
Wikimedia Foundation, e.g. Wikitravel, WiktionaryZ/Omegawiki, 
Dbpedia (is this Wikidata?), OpenLibrary (is this Wikicat?), 
MusicBrainz (like Wikicat for music), and OpenStreetMap.

Nothing stops an interest group such as WikiProject Connecticut 
from working across Wikipedia + Wikisource + Wikiquote + Wikinews
+ Wikitravel + OpenStreetMap + MusicBrainz. This flexibility is an 
enourmous strength, compared to a structure where every new 
project or interest group would have to pass through a centralized 
approval bottleneck and stay within the Wikimedia Foundation.

> 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.

If you have a really great idea for a new project, you can always 
start it on your own.  Wikitravel did and OpenStreetMap did.  I 
don't think the Wikimedia Foundation is stopping you.  Some people 
prefer to complain about how WMF works instead of starting great 
projects.  Are you among them?  How should I know?

Instead of starting your annotated bibliography (which might be a 
good idea) as a new WMF project, perhaps you should start a 
subproject within OpenLibrary?  Who knows if OpenLibrary might 
merge with WMF in the future.

The Wright brothers needed to design their own aircraft to fly 
less than a mile.  I can fly thousands of miles without designing 
my own aircraft.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se