[Foundation-l] Do we have a complete set of WMF projects?

[Erik Moeller]

2009/9/8 Michael Peel <email at mikepeel.net>:
> What could be the cause of this recent dearth of new projects?

Certainly the process for getting a new project underway is so complex
and exhausting that it's not something that many people will be likely
to engage in - especially considering that project ideas are often
proposed by people who aren't currently very active Wikimedians.
Perhaps we need to set up a formal system for long-time Wikimedians to
adopt ideas they're excited about, to help push them to approval? In
any event, if you want to add to the Wikimedia family, my guess is
that it's currently a commitment of 2-3 months of several hours per
week to get to that point, provided it's achievable to begin with.

I do think that project adoption is something that we should explore
in the right circumstances; it's not something we've ever done but IMO
we should be open to it. I don't think OpenStreetMap or OpenLibrary
want or need to be adopted. ;-) But there may be other smaller
semi-successful projects that would like to join our project family,
and that would make sense as part of it.

I would also make the point that adding capabilities to existing
projects can be just as effective at cultivating new communities of
participants as creating an entirely new wiki, and sometimes more so.
For example, as of a few weeks ago, there's now a fledgling community
of people on Wikimedia Commons who add annotations to images, because
a volunteer developed a cool image annotation tool. The entire
community of people adding categories to Wikipedia articles could only
form after the categorization functionality was developed.

Because the Wikipedia community is so vast, adding capabilities that
engage more people on Wikipedia specifically, or improving access to
the existing capabilities, can have dramatically greater impact than
creating a blank-slate wiki.

That is not to say that I think there should be no new blank-slate
wikis, or wikis with custom software, for specific purposes. But I
would also not see the fact that no new top-level Wikimedia project
has been created in recent years as a sign of stagnation - wonderful
capabilities have been created in the existing Wikimedia ecosystem in
that same time period, some of them with dramatic positive impact.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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