[Foundation-l] Re : Where we are headed

[Gerard Meijssen]

James Hare wrote:
> To respond to Jimmy's e-mail,
>
> Another problem with communication is all the pages it spans. I maintained
> several user and user talk pages, but I only need two of them. Although the
> normal MediaWiki software can maintain the status quo, Wikimedia's should be
> designed a bit differently: the projects can have the mainspace, the portal
> space, and the project space, but a central wiki (Meta, anyone?) would have
> the help pages and the user/user talk pages. Surely this has been discussed
> before?
>   
Hoi,
Yes, it has. There are people, myself included who present themselves 
slightly different depending on the project. For instance what is the 
relevance to the Wiktionary crowd that I have written about the fish 
that swim in the Dutch sweet waters?? Some information is of value never 
mind the project eg the language proficiency that can be found in the 
Babel templates. However, this is only of relevance to the projects 
where someone is active.

Centralising the Help pages assumes that all projects have the same 
policies. They don't. It also assumes that the way people people can 
edit is universally the same, it is not; Wiktionary insists on you to 
comply with entering information in a prescribed format, a format that 
is different from language version to language version while the 
Wikipedias are much more free format.

The system messages can be very much centrally maintained. This however 
requires two things:
    * No project specific information in the system messages
    * Continued participation in the Betawiki project of people 
interested in maintaining the localisation of MediaWiki.

Thanks,
    GerardM