[Wikipedia-l] From mass content adding to cross-Wikipedia cooperation

[Milos Rancic]

Finally, I found some time to continue with work on the project Mass
content adding (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mass_content_adding). I
started with preparing materials for adding countries
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Countries_of_the_world and
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Countries_of_the_world/Names_of_the_countries)
and I found a number of open questions of multilingual/cross-Wikipedia
cooperation.

As I want to have the base for countries related things -- on English
Wikipedia -- the first point on the road of getting some help was the
WikiProject Countries
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countries) on
English Wikipedia. I wrote a message to the participants of the
project and I am waiting for their response...

And, here is the point: It is very useful for me that some other
projects can cover some parts of the project Mass content adding. But,
this is the project of English Wikipedia, not a multilingual project.
And I am sure that some people from other Wikipedias would be
interested to participate in the project Mass content adding. Also,
for the MCA project, there is a need for coordination between a number
of Wikipedian communities. And there is no such thing as "Coordination
place for WikiProjects Countries". And this is just one example of
need for cross-Wikipedia coordination/cooperation.

So, I think that all of such projects should have some place on Meta
for multilingual coordination. This means, also, that there people
from different Wikipedias should announce the existance of new project
on some page on Meta.

I would like to see a unified template for countries on all of
Wikipedias; a unified template for biographies on all of Wikipedias;
etc. In general, smaller Wikipedias are copying English templates, but
there are no feed-backs.

I remember: when I asked people on Serbian Wikipedia would we want to
use a template from English Wikipedia, one of them said "Why to use
their, our is better?" And, in deed, in that time Infobox Country on
Serbian Wikipedia was based on Infobox Country on English Wikipedia,
but with some more features.

In other words, I think that a number of technical details on
Wikipedia should be multilingual and not specific for the local
Wikipedias.