[Foundation-l] New Project Process

[Liam Wyatt]

On 3 April 2012 06:50, Ziko van Dijk <vandijk at wmnederland.nl> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Interesting. Please allow me to second that with the proposal to
> reconsider existing projects. For example, what would a WMF evaluation
> of Wikinews or Wikispecies say? Should we shut down such a project, or
> at least cease to mention it on Wikipedia main pages? Or invest money
> in promoting it?
>
> Kind regards
> Ziko
>
>
Interesting examples Ziko - and allow me to go a bit further...
- I'd love to see some kind of "project review" to identify what the
communities of all the different sister-projects and language editions
believe to be the minimum standards of technical support that they expect
from the WMF. We all often hear that everything-other-than-en.WP-is-ignored
but if we had some published/agreed expectations that would make it much
easier to see what was needed.
- Similar to Erik Moeller's presentation at Wikimania 2010 (starting slide
17) I'd like to see some specific focus put on "easy improvements with high
value". In my mind Wiktionary seems to be the logical place where a little
bit of attention could have massive impacts on the project.
https://wikimania2010.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Beyondencyclopediawikimania2010-100714133959-phpapp02.pdf&page=17
- I've often wondered if there has been any formal discussion about the
name "Wikimedia Commons" and whether it should be renamed "WikiCommons" for
consistency with the rest of the projects. This is especially so now that
it is a public-facing project not merely the "service project" it was
originally designed to be.
- Perhaps WikiSpieces should be merged into WikiData (once it's built)
since taxonomic information is most definitely a type of structured data.
- Also, could we look at merging the OutreachWiki, the StrategyWiki and
MetaWiki? Maybe they could all live at the (currently extremely
under-utilised) domain of http://www.wikimedia.org/
- Finally, and more generally, could we make an assessment of the kind of
software changes that could be made to make connecting between different
wikis easier - both for readers and for editors. Now we have
SingleUserLogin, global userpages and watchlists would seem an obvious step
to making it easier for editors to work across projects.

Just some very rough ideas!

-Liam