[Foundation-l] New Project Process

[Yann Forget]

Hi,

Le 5 avril 2012 05:04, Jürgen Fenn <schneeschmelze at googlemail.com> a écrit :
> Am 3. April 2012 22:22 schrieb Samuel Klein <sjklein at hcs.harvard.edu>:
>
>> Ziko:
>>> what would a WMF evaluation of Wikinews or Wikispecies say? Should we shut down such
>>> a project... cease to mention it on Wikipedia main pages... or invest money in promoting it?
>>
>> Good questions, subtle answers.  Those are not the only options; we
>> might help them merge with a similar project.  For instance,
>> wikieducator and wikiversity have almost identical missions, and might
>> benefit from being merged; the question of 'who hosts the site' is
>> relatively minor compared to the loss of splitting energy and focus
>> across two wikis.
>
> I would like to add another option: Who not merge all projects into
> Wikipedia proper? The lack in participation in the sister projects is
> largely due to the fact that hardly anyone knows about them. Wikipedia
> is the only Wikimedia brand people know of. There is nothing you can
> do about it. If the sister projects were living in their own
> namespaces within Wikipedia this would be different. We would have,
> say, a Wikipedia dictionary. They would become part of Wikipedia and,
> hence, partaking in Wikipedia's popularity. Putting money in sister
> projects just means wasting funds. The future lies in integrating them
> into Wikipedia. Five years of experience is enough to tell.

I beg to disagree on all this.
Yes, people do not know about the sister projects, but you can do a
lot about that.
First, start by promoting them, instead of only promoting Wikipedia.
There are very good reasons why these projects are separate: different
scopes, different rules, etc.
Merging them at this point would be the worst idea: they would sink in
the sea of controversy.

No, the future does not lie in making one for binding them all in the
darkness. ;o)
The future lies in diversity. Five years of indifference do not prove anything.

> Regards,
> Jürgen.

Regards,
Yann