[Wikipedia-l] Starting a new wiki

[Evan Prodromou]

Tim Starling wrote:

> People underestimate the cost involved in setting up a wiki.

Once again I'd like to point out that having a language-specific Wikipedia is 
not usually the best way to organize, promote, or develop a language.

It's probably much better for a group of interested people working on a small or 
endangered language to set up a general-purpose wiki that encompasses the 
Wikimedia ideas of a Wikipedia, Wiktionary, a language-learning Wikibook, and 
perhaps a few other community- or discussion-oriented purposes.

There are a _lot_ of free or low-cost PHP hosting services that can host a wiki. 
Mediawiki can be hard to set up on these services, since MySQL usually costs 
significantly more, but there are a number of other wiki engines* that work with 
  flat files and don't require a database.

Anyways: I think the best strategy is to tell people who want to have a 
Wikipedia in their language to go start a wiki somewhere else. If they can show 
that they have a robust community that can support a Wikipedia, then they should 
get an xx.wikipedia.org domain (as well as other xx.wikisomething.org stuff).

~ESP

* I can hear it now: "Huh? There are other wiki engines? There are other wikis? 
I can set up my own? Huh?"
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 256 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20040919/05f5a1ae/attachment.pgp