Expanding Content

Stu -- what Foundation resources do small Projects draw? Most projects run MediaWiki with minimal customization, and are not visibly drawing any resources beyond server time and bandwidth. Server and bandwidth usage are proportional to popularity, which is the standard metric for projct success... so projects are either successful or inexpensive. I don't see a compelling 'foundation resource use' reason to shut them down.

There may be other concerns - a draw on community resources seems plausible, and is one of the reasons we try to keep tiny new language-editions on a shared incubator until they have reached a certain initial size. And focus is important; perhaps that should limit the number of kinds of Projects that we can host and actively support with feature development. But we currently are pretty slow in terms of innovation and new feature development -- if we decided to Focus on 3-5 Projects, that would mean an increase from the 2 we currently support in any meaningful way (WP and Commons).

Brutal clarity/honesty about what it takes for a project to continue getting foundation resources is really important, not only for the staff but much more importantly for the people in those communities.

Clarity is key. It need not be brutal... we could do much better, but most projects are used to getting by with a basic all-purpose tool. Currently the Foundation provides technical, usability, and other support to Wikipedia and Commons, and other projects get very limited attention. Wiktionary does not receive attention compared to its popularity and universality. The other projects expect little that they can't build themselves, so it would be joyful and not brutal for the Foundation to define a set of projects that would be taken into consideration when setting technical, promotion, and other priorities.

It would be interesting to try to quantify Foundation resources required to support all projects. Every additional project means dealing with more tech requests and general support calls. I don't think the tech resources are trivial. They could easily occupy a single, full-time person, which, when you only have 15 tech people, is a significant percentage.

The bigger problem is the energy around lack of focus and clarity. The more projects you have, the harder it is to explain what Wikimedia is about. The fact that we haven't already articulated the criteria around what constitutes a Wikimedia project indicates the strategic challenge around this.

That is both a Foundation issue and a movement-wide concern.

Why couldn´t we strengthen the tech-volunteers? I know for example that there is one Foundation person (brian?) who is looking into the extensions, if there is one that could be used by our projects.

About focus and clarity: The same problem is if wikipedia should be open to as much articles as possible or should wikipedia stick to the more high level articles. I don´t want to discuss what the focus should be, I would rather ask how should we decide those type of questions. Is the board the one who decide this, is it the local community or should we decide it in a way we changed from GFDL to Creative Commons?

By the way, at meta there is meta:Proposals for new projects.

To make all of human culture and knowledge
available to everyone, everywhere, forever.
That is the foundation of the wikimedia projects.

Hows that for focus and clarity?