[Foundation-l] Merge wikis

[Liam Wyatt]

Within the general concept of Merging Wikis I agree, it would be good in
principle to have one uber-wiki that is the central hub of all community
things (meta, outreach, strategy...). Each time we create a separate wiki
Ward Cunningham kills a kitten.

I wonder - would it be possible in MediaWiki to make it possible for User
accounts to be given read/edit permissions to different areas of the Wiki.
If that were possible (which I'm sure is a common request from MediaWiki's
Corporate users) then we would also be able to merge InternalWiki,
CheckuserWiki, ChapComWiki to this uber-wiki. The WMF would also be able to
merge their OfficeWiki, BoardWiki, and WikimediaFoundation.org. I'm sure
that many Chapters also run at least two Wikis - one for the public and one
for their elected Board.

Personally would like to this new uber-wiki be hosted at *
http://www.wikimedia.org/* (rather than Meta) which is currently just a
placeholder that points to all of the projects. Other relevant additions to
MediaWiki would be having universal watchlists and universal User/UserTalk
pages as well as the ability (which is coming in LiquidThreads
v.3<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/LiquidThreads_3.0>)
to Watchlist specific individual threads in talkpages.

On a separate note, have we had a discussion recently about the name
"Wikimedia Commons" and whether it would be a good idea to simply call it
"WikiCommons" to make it consistent with the rest of the projects? Or, is
this a perennial proposal? From what I understand, the reason that it was
called that Wikimedia Commons originally was that was created to be a
"service project" for the Wikipedia language editions and was not expected
to be considered a "sister project" alongside WikiSource, WikiNews,
WikiBooks... Now that it definitely IS a sister project, do you think it is
a good idea to rename it? I note that a lot of people who reuse our
multimedia are attributing it as coming from WikiCommons already anyway (google
news search for the
term<http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=WikiCommons&btnmeta_news_search=Search+News>for
example.)

-Liam

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