[Wikimedia-l] The Wikipedia Library

[Jake Orlowitz]

I'm sensitive to concerns about the Library's location.  It is partly a
legacy issue:  The Wikipedia Library partnerships started on English
Wikipedia, and that's where the Credo, HighBeam, Questia, JSTOR, and
Cochrane account donations were coordinated.  This made some sense at the
time because these were English language source being donated (although the
donations were promoted to and open to all global editors and projects).   That
will remain--global notifications about account donations and organizing
will be sent using Global Message Delivery, Wikimedia Foundation blog posts
and Signpost mentions will make other announcements.

This is always a tricky issue for our movement but the intent is very much
to benefit all projects and conduct outreach to all regions.  For
neutrality, META is obviously best, but for overall convenience, English
Wikipedia remains the largest and most active project, with the highest
concentration of English language speakers.   So in that sense it's a
question of maximizing convenience versus equalizing inconvenience.  If
hosted on Meta, everyone has to switch wikis to get there.  If hosted on
ENWP, all non-ENWP still editors have to switch wikis to get there, but the
huge chunk of ENWP editors do not.
This will hopefully become much less of an issue with interface changes
like Flow and Global Watchlists.  Meta did just get notifications, so
that's helpful, but I still feel collaboration is somewhat limited by our
current infrastrcutre.

There are other concerns such as turning Meta into a true hub for all of
our editors, and representing our global nature by hosting global projects
there.  These are important, and I want to give it more thought.

So, in the meantime going to look into hosting this on Meta, and I will
definitely at least mirror a portal there.  It may take some time while we
continue to organize and get set up

I'd like to continue talking more about this.  Cheers,

Jake Orlowitz (Ocaasi)
jorlowitz at gmail.com