[WikiEN-l] The right place for discussion on project best practices?

[Carcharoth]

A general discussion here is not out of place, though to get anything
done, you will almost certainly have to repeat the discussion on a
centralised page on Wikipedia, suitable advertised in the right places
to attract a good number of people to your proposal.

One thing to bear in mind is that Wikipedia is a lot more
decentralised than you may realise. People have had similar ideas in
the past (though I think some of yours are new or at least not
perennial suggestions) and the thing that bogs most of them down is a
need to avoid bureaucratic processes that don't work well with a
volunteer workforce. However, there are disadvantages to a
decentralised approach, some of which you identify, so shifting the
balance a bit and setting up a well-designed process can help.

The critical thing is to get enough people on board that the new
practice spreads and becomes routine and normal. If you end up with
bot programmers getting involved, that almost certainly means it is
here to stay, but that is not essential - get an active community
working on one or more of the points you raise, and that is how things
tend to progress around here.

You may also be interested in the strategy wiki:

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

That tends to focus more on WMF-wide strategy, but I may have that
wrong as I haven't found the time yet to look at that site in detail.
If there is not an en-Wikipedia-specific area there, then the closest
we have are the village pumps, though someone may have set a page up
somewhere that I don't know about (quite likely). I would also suggest
doing some searches within Wikipedia using some of the terms you are
using, to see if those issues have been discussed before.

The other thing that tends to result in things not getting done is
getting the wrong balance between talking and planning, and getting
things done (as with many things in life, sometimes just getting on
with something is faster than planning, unless you are taking a very
long-term view, and even then, practical experience can be fed back
into the planning process to improve things while you are planning).

Carcharoth

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 5:05 PM, Michael Ritchey
<RitcheyMT at familysearch.org> wrote:
> Is this an appropriate forum for opening a discussion on project best practices? The articles and discussions I've found on Wikipedia so far are really weak and general. I'd like to share my own learnings and also discuss best practices in:
> 1. Components of a good project page
> 2. Good tools for virtual meetings
> 3. Team member roles
> 4. How best to orient team members who are new to Wikipedia
> 5. Reporting progress
> 6. Finding contributors with certain skills
> 7. Possible correlation between number of edits and % "done"
> 8. Maximizing granularity of assignments
> 9. Repurposing edit stalkers before they discourage new contributors
> 10. The value of using formal management processes (like Scrum)
> 11. Avoiding continual redesign of many like articles to avoid design analysis paralysis and maximize content generation
> 12. ...and others
>
> If this is not the right place to discuss these things, have you any suggestions as to where to do it? Even outside WP I see no good discussions going on regarding best practices of community writing projects. There's nothing on LinkedIn, Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, forums, or even blogs, as far as I've been able to find. If I have to build such a forum I will, but I was hoping to start one related specifically to WP so we could pull knowledge people who are relatively more experienced than many outside WP -- people who perhaps are so busy organizing and contributing to projects that they are not sharing their best practices yet. I know the knowledge is out there; I just want to get people sharing it.
>
> Michael
>
>
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