[Foundation-l] Re: Wikijunior - Wikispecies, Mk 2?

[Delirium]

Erik Moeller wrote:

>Part of the reason people are reluctant to be very open about certain  
>things is that discussions can become literally endless, with no goal  
>being achieved. So what I believe we need are clear procedures how to get  
>community input on issues and making decisions. I hope the Wikinews case  
>can, in some ways, serve as a precedent when it comes to starting new  
>projects.
>  
>
I'm sure others disagree, but IMO it would be better if there were not a 
particularly easy way to start new projects.  We so far have exactly one 
highly successful project, from what I can tell---Wikipedia.  Wiktionary 
has been languishing for years now in relative disuse (and in my brief 
attempts to use it to look up words, doesn't have enough words in it to 
be useful as a dictionary, driving me back to reference.com), Wikisource 
is still getting off the ground and is fairly disorganized, and 
Wikibooks has only in the last 6 months seen any books that are remotely 
close to being reasonable books (and even the ones labeled with 4 blocks 
as "complete" are still *far* short of book length and detail... we have 
nothing on Wikibooks that can compete with a commercial textbook).  I'd 
rather we spent some time working on these projects we already have 
instead of spawning off still more projects, lest we become a 
clearinghouse of ideas that were started but never really carried through.

To be clear, this isn't opposition to Wikinews---I think Wikinews is a 
well-defined project with a clear group of users interested in working 
on it and minimal overlap with other projects, but I think that would be 
a good place to stop for now.  After starting Wikinews, and counting 
Wikispecies, we'll have six projects---Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, 
Wikinews, Wikispecies, and Wikisource---of which only one, Wikipedia, is 
really in a well-developed state.

-Mark