Technical and policy needs for expanding to new projects

Technical Needs

I'm trying to crystallize the concerns I hear (not my own) from people who are concerned by the growth and progress of smaller Projects, and see that as a potential cost rather than an opportunity. This is the predominant argument against starting new Projects; we do not lack for ideas for Projects within our mission scope.

One of the most predictable costs is one of development of interfaces, data models, &c necessary for new projects.

Two straightforward examples are OSM and Multilingual Wiktionary / OmegaWiki. Are they in line with our mission? Yes. Do they run on MediaWiki? No. Are they Wikimedia projects? No. If they had started life as Wikimedia projects, would we have supported their development as well as their independent grassroots efforts have?

If we are only willing to support current MediaWiki features and simple extensions, that affects how we frame the idea of what new Projects can look like or accomplish. If we can do more, then these are case studies to use in evaluating how we can improve our process.