[Foundation-l] Merge wikis

[Milos Rancic]

On 07/01/2011 11:52 PM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
> 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.

Thanks for raising this issue. Previously discussed system of redirects
and Incubator Extension [1] would help not just to the Incubator, but to
the languages with smaller amount of speakers, as well as to Meta forks.
So, instead of having numerous meta wikis, we could have just one
(Meta), with separate namespaces, which would get redirects. Thus,
namespace "Strategy:" could be strategy.wikimedia.org; namespace
"Research" could be research.wikimedia.org etc.

[1] http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/235020?page=last