[Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked

[MZMcBride]

Steven Walling wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 5:04 PM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm having a hard time remembering when a WMF led a project that had a
>> primary stated objective to meet a need of a sister project.  It would
>> be good to compile a list of any WMF projects of this kind.  maybe the
>> WMF can have _one_ "sister projects support officer" (think how many
>> dedicated _English_Wikipedia_ support staff the WMF has).
> 
> There is an entire department -- Global Development -- whose current job is
> to support the growth of the many Indic language projects, Portuguese
> Wikipedia, and Arabic Wikipedia (they call that Middle East, North Africa)?
> 
> Or how about the hundreds of hours spent in Tech on the new Commons
> UploadWizard?

Steven, you seem to have completely missed the mark.

John was responding to my comment(s) about the focus of Wikimedia being
Wikipedia (mostly the English-language version) and occasionally Wikimedia
Commons. John said "I'm having a hard time remembering when a WMF led a
project that had a primary stated objective to meet a need of a sister
project." By this, he meant a project like Wikinews, Wikisource, Wikiversity
or any of the other sister projects of Wikipedia:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Wikipedia%27s_sister_projects>.

The examples you gave were a few other Wikipedias and Wikimedia Commons. Is
there an entire department working on Wikisource? What about Wikiversity?
Wikinews? Is there a single staffer who's even thinking about any of them as
part of their work? I don't know of any. And, back to the original thought:
are there any Wikimedia initiatives to specifically (or "primarily") improve
any of these sister projects? I also don't know of any.

MZMcBride