[Foundation-l] New Project Process

[Jürgen Fenn]

Am 3. April 2012 22:22 schrieb Samuel Klein <sjklein at hcs.harvard.edu>:

> Ziko:
>> what would a WMF evaluation of Wikinews or Wikispecies say? Should we shut down such
>> a project... cease to mention it on Wikipedia main pages... or invest money in promoting it?
>
> Good questions, subtle answers.  Those are not the only options; we
> might help them merge with a similar project.  For instance,
> wikieducator and wikiversity have almost identical missions, and might
> benefit from being merged; the question of 'who hosts the site' is
> relatively minor compared to the loss of splitting energy and focus
> across two wikis.

I would like to add another option: Who not merge all projects into
Wikipedia proper? The lack in participation in the sister projects is
largely due to the fact that hardly anyone knows about them. Wikipedia
is the only Wikimedia brand people know of. There is nothing you can
do about it. If the sister projects were living in their own
namespaces within Wikipedia this would be different. We would have,
say, a Wikipedia dictionary. They would become part of Wikipedia and,
hence, partaking in Wikipedia's popularity. Putting money in sister
projects just means wasting funds. The future lies in integrating them
into Wikipedia. Five years of experience is enough to tell.

Regards,
Jürgen.