[Foundation-l] Incubator improvements

[Milos Rancic]

On 06/07/2011 09:34 PM, Robin Pepermans wrote:
> Milos Rancic said that I should announce this on foundation-l, so here it
> is:
> 
> I had written a MediaWiki extension specifically for Wikimedia Incubator.
> It's now enabled, so users can set their test wiki preference, and there are
> also recent changes per test wiki. For example, changes in the Kichwa
> Wikipedia test: <
> http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges?limit=250&rc-testwiki-project=p&rc-testwiki-code=qug
>>
> 
> More features will be added later, e.g. a welcome portal for non-existent
> projects that will hopefully in the future replace the current "wiki does
> not exist" page.

This is much more important than Robin values his own work. Incubator
extension is the first step for a couple of important things:

* "Wiki does not exist" is a message for very limited number of
languages. For example, there is no Wikiversity in Serbian and by typing
http://sr.wikiversity.org/ you will get "this wiki does not exist". At
the other side, for example, we have a living Gheg Albanian community at
Incubator, but by typing http://aln.wikipedia.org/ -- you will get DNS
error. Thus, proper implementation would mean that if you type
http://xyz.wikipedia.org/ -- where "xyz" is a valid ISO 639-3 code, you
would get "Welcome. This is to be the site for a free encyclopedia in
the XYZ language. If you speak XYZ then you can get started right now in
building this particular Wikipedia!"

* Projects inside of the Incubator won't have to wait for "sustainable
activity" to get "their Wikipedia".

* Languages with small population would be able to get some types of
projects -- like Wiktionary and Wikibooks are -- inside of their
Wikipedias. So, http://xyz.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikibooks:something would
have redirect from http://xyz.wiktionary.org/wiki/something.

* Articles about languages on Wikipedias could have additional template:
There is no Wikipedia in this language, but you can start it here!

I think that those enhancements would back us into the days when we were
welcoming new projects, as well as speakers of various languages would
get appropriate tools and help for creating successful projects.