Proposal:Interwiki cooperation

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The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

Strategic Priorities

Every proposal should be tied to one of the strategic priorities below.

Edit this page to help identify the priorities related to this proposal!

1. Achieve continued growth in readership
2. Focus on quality content
3. Increase Participation
4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
5. Encourage Innovation

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Proposal

Each of the Wikimedia projects have communities mostly independent of the other projects, rarely with help from contributors to sister projects. Some of the projects have content that is of the same topic as other projects, and thus could use some help from sister project contributors. There are a number of ways that interwiki cooperation could be of help to all of the projects, but unfortunately the project communities for the most part remain only contributing to their home project, even when their help to one of the sister projects would be quite welcome. There are a number of ways we could help build interwiki cooperation:

1. Build interwiki "embassies". To start with, nobody likes to be a clueless newbie at a new project, not knowing about any of the policies, or any of the people, or how things are done. This could be helped somewhat by building interwiki "embassies" that would be for asking questions about a sister project from the comfort of their own home project, whether for use in helping their own project or for helping another project. Many wikimedians have questions about related projects but are highly reluctant to venture out into a foreign Wikimedia project and ask a question there. Each project could have embassies to each other project (e.g., Wikibooks would have an embassy to Wiktionary and vice-versa) which would be periodically checked by users who are familiar with both projects.
2. Have interwiki Wikiprojects. Many projects have "Wikiprojects" or some equivalent, and many of these overlap somewhat. Thus, it would make sense to have interwiki Wikiprojects. For example, there could be a Wikimedia French language Wikiproject, which would deal with Wikipedia articles that deal with the French language, the French Wikibook, French words on the Wiktionary, and the French course on the Wikiversity. This would allow projects to share communities to some extent, which would be especially of use to subjects with a small amount of overall contributors, due to this one fairly well-known fact: It is virtually impossible to get anything done without a community. This means that, at the moment, smaller projects are dying when all that was needed to continue was a community of some sort. It would not have to be a community of especially active contributors, it would be enough to have contributors from other projects just do a bit of help every once in a while, and that would be enough just to keep the work alive.
3. Increase interwiki links. Interwiki links are already very widely used, but there are still very many places where a interwiki link would be useful, but there still aren't any. Having more interwiki links would encourage regular contributors to that subject of one project to consider also helping out on another project.

Potential Costs

None.

Community Discussion

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