[Foundation-l] Friendliness

[Keegan Peterzell]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 5:17 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari at wikimedia.org>wrote:

> 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.
>
> Ryan Kaldari
>
>
I agree.

We point new users who do not know how to get involved to visit WikiProjects
to find common ground with other editors.  We do that as helpers, at
conferences, at WMF presentations on introduction to editing. t's quite
clear that as a community our best chances for retention is a sense of
belonging in a specific project or task whether it's WikiProject Fungi to
WikiProject Countervandalism.  Finding a specific project when being new to
templates that point to the projects do not offer a whole lot of guidance.
 I've wondered since I joined in 2005 why they don't have their own
project-space.  The only reason I can come up with is that Wikiprojects are
loose affiliations of editors and an independent namespace is related to a
Wikimedia task-oriented mandate that Wikiprojects do not have.  How would
such a proposal be set up?  An RfC?  Village Pump?  The whim of developers
for a bug report?

It would be quite useful.

-- 
~Keegan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan