Proposal talk:Interwiki cooperation

From Strategic Planning

It looks to me that there are two basic problems with this proposal:

  1. "It is virtually impossible to get anything done without a community." This very much depends on what you are talking about: a project (a Wikipedia in a certain language) with only one user will obviously be at a disadvantage, so there needs to be a certain minimum amount of users. Whether there needs to be a community is quite a different matter; a community is a certain number of users who make agreements among themselves. And wherever agreements are made there is a tendency to make an exception in favour of oneself. "The rule is "A" but this does not apply to us, we are going to do "B", because that helps us, even although it does not help the project.". In practice a community is a means towards an end and it can work out to a disadvantage as well as favorably. It all depends.
  2. "Increase interwiki links". In many cases there are too many interwiki links already. If a Wikipedia divides up topics in a weird way, this leads to a strong increase of wrong interwiki links in many other wikipedias.

So, if this proposal is aimed to solve a particular problem, that particular problem should be specified. Which problem, where? As it now stands it is a blunt instrument, as likely to do damage as to help. - Brya 13:59, 4 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The problem this proposal is trying to solve is this: too many aspects of Wikimedia have no community and thus cannot get anything done. For example, someone trying to add words to Wiktionary in a little known language will have extreme difficulty with this (the language needs community decided policies, an about page, templates etc.). Likewise, very many Wikibooks have similar problems, as a Wikibook really can't be done by one person. Were users from one project to also sometimes help out on another project, these problems could be solved. --Yair rand 04:32, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]