[Foundation-l] Proposal for new project

[Robert S. Horning]

On 10/21/2010 08:21 AM, Ziko van Dijk wrote:
> I wouldn't say that a "how-to" is necessarily NPOV, although there are
> more ways to do something. But such a project can be realised already
> within Wikibooks.
> Kind regards
> Ziko
>
>    

How-to books are on Wikibooks mainly due to the long-ago viewpoint that 
Wikibooks ought to be an incubator project for all kinds of ideas that 
didn't quite fit on Wikipedia... and the Wikibooks community was 
generally willing to try them out for a time.

I've never been a real fan with the "new project" process as it relates 
to Wikimedia, and I find it unfortunate that nothing new has been 
created for quite some time.  The last major "community-sponsored" (aka 
the idea originated with ordinary users as opposed to something of a pet 
project by a WMF board member) project to become a major Wikimedia 
project was Wikiversity.  Even that met stiff resistance and even out 
right rejection by the WMF board in spite of overwhelming support from 
the community and had even been "incubated" at Wikibooks for quite a 
while prior to that.  It took some substantial effort to get the board 
to reconsider, with what I saw was mostly a bunch of wheel spinning that 
really didn't do too much good.

As I've mentioned on the talk pages at Meta, I wish somebody would 
officially state on Meta and elsewhere that new Wikimedia sister 
projects will never be started, thanks for trying anyway and have a nice 
day.  I could go into the cynical viewpoint on how new sister projects 
are started, but it would create a flame war royale.

This mailing list is the correct place to put ideas like this forward, 
but be prepared to get it shot down and shot down hard.  It isn't just 
99% of all ideas like this get shot down, I have yet to see any idea get 
proposed here on this list to ever become a sister project unless there 
has been a HUGE effort involving at least hundreds if not many more 
Wikimedians and often an effort to delete a major category of content 
from one of the existing projects as well.  Wikiversity as a separate 
project started as a "Votes for Deletion" discussion, as did Wikibooks 
for that matter (from Wikipedia).

Good luck with this idea, as you'll need it if you want to get it going.

-- Robert Horning
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