Increase cross-wiki activities

WikiProjects are helpful in creating a productive environment. Global WikiProjects would help gather experts on a subject, in many languages. This would help smaller Wikipedias because they don't have the critical mass needed to set up their own local WikiProjects. These project would however need to be hosted somewhere else than on the local wikis, and this would require a global watchlist, so that the users can be aware of the changes to the global WikiProjects even if they only log in to their own home wiki.

Some comments:

• A recommendation about this exists on this wiki.
• Maybe this strategy wiki could serve as place to host these projects.
• Caution: not all WikiProjects are beneficial.

In a sense this can be seen as one of the things we have to do to achieve the goal "Improve Participation" and its sub-goals. But I think it is so important that it deserves its own subsection:

In the bigger Wikipedias we have WikiProjects that have the expertise for handling articles on specific subjects. Some of them, such as wikipedia:en:WP:WikiProject Mathematics and wikipedia:en:WP:WikiProject Medicine, are very active and are dominated by their academic members. This results in a better social climate because you are generally discussing with people you might meet at your next conference, and in a large proportion of friction-free, professional, often unanimous group decisions. Members of such projects can generally judge each other's competence very well, and defer to each other's opinion where appropriate. These are excellent conditions for creating high-quality content with little unproductive conflict.

Smaller wikis cannot profit from WikiProjects because they don't have the critical mass. A WikiProject with just two or three active members isn't really much better than discussions on the members' user talk pages.

In my opinion we need infrastructure for cross-wiki projects. E.g. most physicists world-wide have at least a tolerable command of English. There should be a global Wikimedia Physics Project with subprojects for the different languages. This project and its subprojects should not just be responsible for Wikipedia, but also for Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikisource etc. Some advantages:

• Wikipedia editors become more aware of the other projects:
  • More contributions to the smaller projects.
  • Content is more likely to be added to the project that is best suited to it.
  • Editors are more likely to make transwikification proposals appropriately in deletion discussions.
• Better quality control for the smaller projects.
• Encourages discussion in the global project (in English) if a small Wikipedia doesn't have the experts needed to settle a difficult content question.

A proposal in this direction has just been made on the English Wikipedia, and people seem to like it. I think the one big thing that we need to make this practicable is a global watchlist.

Well, there is a reason why this is a recommendation on this strategy Wiki (here). However, a caution is in order, there are all kinds of WikiProjects, and they are not necessarily beneficial. This may also lead to a local Wikiproject with sufficient critical mass becoming a millstone around the neck of other projects rather than just the local project. - Brya 16:50, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

In addition to Brya's note about the Wikipedia Quality task force recommendation, I'd encourage you to think about how this wiki might serve as a very lightweight home for such cross-wiki projects. Specifically, I think a task force structure might be very useful.

I have no experience with the task force structure and I have trouble imagining how it would help in this case. I also doubt that this wiki is the right place for such a cross-project WikiProject. The best way to kill a project is to put it on a separate wiki on which almost nothing happens. This one doesn't even seem to be part of the global login for global accounts. People have no reason to log in here, or look at their watchlist here, frequently, because nothing interesting ever happens here. So they will just stay on their home wiki most of the time. This is a vicious circle which can only be broken by avoiding the proliferation of separate wikis (What is this one for? Why is it not simply on Meta? Why is it not even linked from www.wikimedia.org? How many more tiny separate wikis of this type are there?) or by global watchlists. Preferably both.

A cross-project WikiProject would have to go somewhere. Any wiki you chose would have similar problems of tracking, etc. I do think global watchlists would be very helpful.

To answer your questions about this wiki in particular:

• This wiki does use SUL.
• We originally considered doing this work on Meta, but several people warned us about rampant trolling and policy creep there (a situation which I think has improved considerably over the past several months). We decided to start our work here, and we've been very happy with participation. I don't think not being on Meta hurt us, and it may have even helped us, as we were able to establish our own cultural norms and also innovate more aggressively (LiquidThreads, for example). We're currently exploring what should happen with this wiki when this process completes. I'd encourage you to post your thoughts on Village Pump.

SUL is not working here. This is the only wiki where I had to log in separately since SUL was introduced, and others have reported the same problem on this talk page. Global accounts work here, though. Perhaps this wiki is using a newer version of MediaWiki that is currently incompatible to most other installations?

I maintain that without global watchlists WikiProjects are unlikely to work on a separate wiki that people would visit only because of the project. Even with the current traffic at WikiProject Mathematics on en Wikipedia I wouldn't normally visit a wiki more than once or twice in a week to see if there is anything new. The resulting slow response times are simply not acceptable to editors who are used to a big wiki. This is highly relevant because the scientifically oriented cross-wiki projects would be made up in large part by the international editor community that is currently concentrated at en Wikipedia.

Yeah, there are a couple of wikis where SUL is a little off... this is one of them. We filed a bug, I'll see if I can check on the status of it. It has something to do with the way the wiki was originally set up.

Hans Alder wrote: "I think the one big thing that we need to make this practicable is a global watchlist."

This user supports integrated, interwiki global watchlists.

I think it is the only thing that will make wikis outside Wikipedia and the Commons work well, and stay up to date. Please see:

• en:Wikipedia:Integrated watchlists

Cool. Added to User:Eekim.