[Foundation-l] Possible project

[Samuel Klein]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 10:08 PM, Chad <innocentkiller at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Over the years, I've seen two general approaches to trying to launch
> a new Wikimedia site. The first is trying to come up with a *new* idea
> for a wiki. They start discussion on here or meta and typically it dies
> out because people lose interest in trying to flesh out a new project.

That's one good approach.  It often involves setting up a trial
project; as with the genealogy projects discussed on Meta's new
project proposals page.

> The second approach that I've seen used is trying to get the Foundation
> to "adopt" some existing project. This also tends to fail as people get
> caught up over specifics (licensing, etc) and then lose interest.

Adoption is a bit trickier -- we haven't had very good test cases to
see what makes sense and what doesn't.  There are a number of
interesting educational collaboration projects out there, but those of
general widespread interest haven't been the ones looking for
adoption.

Niche projects that are far more specific than our current Projects
can be hard to consider for adoption.  Unlike projects such as Wikia,
we encourage unified namespaces so that there is one Project for a
given type of knowledge or collaboration.  So ParliamentWiki and
CongressCMS would ideally make peace with becoming portals within a
larger existing Project.  This has not happened yet, save perhaps for
some adopted dictionaries.


> Or it gets said that Wikimedia is not a "host*" for projects.

That was poor phrasing on my part - Wikimedia is prominently a host
for global multilingual collaborative-knowledge projects.

But Wikimedia is not at present a host or explicit supporter of any
satellite services that might be useful to such collaborations -- say,
public scratchpad providers (etherpad), public wiki providers, or
public mailing list providers (librelist?).   It is not even a host or
explicit supporter of services that provide part of a toolchain for
frequent contributions to existing Wikimedia projects  -- such as
Distributed Proofreaders or Librivox.

I would expect to see us start recognizing and supporting the latter
class of projects before the more abstract former set, though both are
important to the larger task of facilitating knowledgework.  And in
many cases, the best way that we could support a project may not be
through hosting, but instead through directing traffic and attention;
or sponsoring current work.  [we do occasionally give explicit support
and recognition to projects such as Freenode without which our
community would be much poorer]

The questions of what projects are important to free collaboration,
and how we can support them, are quite important.  As Philippe
mentioned, this is being discussed currently at
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Content_scope

SJ