[Foundation-l] breaking English Wikipedia apart

[John Vandenberg]

Was: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
Was: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness

On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 2/25/11 3:11 PM, John Vandenberg wrote:
>> On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 11:18 PM,  <dex2000 at pc.dk> wrote:
>>> ..
>>> I think it could also be considered to divide our huge language wikis
>>> into smaller parts. The existing WikiProjects could be made virtual wikis
>>> with their own admins, recent changes etc. That way, each project is in
>>> fact like a small wiki to which the newbie could sign up according to
>>> 'hers' area of interest and where the clarrity and friendlier atmosphere
>>> of the smaller wikis could prevail.
>>
>> This is the best solution, in my opinion.
>
> Yes, the larger wikis need to become WikiProject-centric. First step in
> doing this would be to create a WikiProject namespace. Second step would
> be to make WikiProject article tagging/assessment part of the software
> instead of template-based.

I can see how those would be useful steps, however I think those steps
are part of a 10 year plan.

A 10 year plan will be overrun by events.

We need a much more direct plan.

I recommend breaking enWP apart by finding easy chunks and moving them
to a separate instance, and having readonly copies on the main project
like we do for File: pages from Commons.

IMO, the simplest and most useful set of articles to break apart is BLPs.
The criteria is really simple, and those articles already have lots of
policy differences around them.

By the time we have perfected this system with the BLPs, the community
will have come to understand the costs/benefits of moving other
clusters of articles to separate projects, and we'll see other
clusters of articles migrated to sub-projects.

btw, this idea is not new, but maybe its time has come.
http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=29729

--
John Vandenberg