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

[Rebecca]

> 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 partly agree with this, and partly not. We have the one highly
successful project, and a second one coming along nicely in
Wikisource. It's still got a long way to go, but it doesn't have the
problems with disuse that Wiktionary and Wikibooks have. I do think we
should concentrate on improving the ones we have, but some of these
projects, such as Wikinews, are likely to be considerably easier to
contribute to (as is the case with WP and WS), which would make them a
more viable solution than some of our current projects.

> instead of spawning off still more projects, lest we become a
> clearinghouse of ideas that were started but never really carried through.

Still, this is something we really need to watch out for.

-- ambi