[Foundation-l] Merge wikis

[Ziko van Dijk]

Dear colleague,

What you say makes absolute sence. I have the suspicion that there was
a time, around 2009, that new activities in WMF were eager to have a
wiki of its own: Strategy, Outreach and so on. Alas, after a while of
retention, there came Ten wiki. The intention was to have a website
for the public, but I don't believe in creating again and again more
and more communication channels. I see the same tendency in WMNL, by
the way.

About the sister projects such as Wiktionary and Wikisource: there is
ALS.WP doing that already, maybe knowing that it would be hard to
create thoses sister projects in ALS (Alemannic). In general I would
like to see more bounds between the sisters, including Wikipedia. We
had that discussion with regard to a rebranding, going under the name
of Wikipedia only and have a Wikipedia Foundation, a Wikipedia
dictionary (Wiktionary), a Wikipedia Text Books (Wikibooks) and so on.

But in those sister projects communities, I have met fierce resistance
to any new branding or technical rearrangement. They even tend to
avoid to associate themselves with Wikipedia. They want to grow on
their own appeal and strengh. (They also are annoyed when Wikipedians
come to a sister project and don't learn immediately that the rules
differ.)

Kind regards
Ziko van Dijk




2011/7/1 WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers at gmail.com>:
> One thing I find irritating and complex about our structure is the
> proliferation of small wikis. Now I've no objection to the idea that
> we have a wiki for every language on Earth, though where languages are
> mutually intelligible such as the major dialects of English  it seems
> sensible to me that we combine them in one wiki - if necessary with
> spelling and alphabet being subject to user preference.
>
> But I see no reason why ten wiki, Strategy and the various wikimanias
> each need their own wiki as opposed to being projects within meta.
>
> On a broader and more radical note, why do we need separate wikis for
> wikiquote, wikiversity, wikipedia wikinews and wiktionary? Surely each
> of those could be separate namespaces within a language wiki?
>
> This would make it much easier when people create an article on
> wikipedia that is really a wiktionary or wikinews article as one could
> just move it. It would immediately reduce the number of userpages,
> watchlists and usertalk pages that one needed to maintain to one per
> language (plus meta and commons). It would also foster cooperation
> between editors across what are currently different projects if you
> had one wiki for each language, as individual wikiprojects would now
> work across what are currently quite separate  news, quote and pedia
> projects.
>
> WereSpielChequers
>
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-- 
Ziko van Dijk
The Netherlands
http://zikoblog.wordpress.com/