Expanding Content

Well, several years ago I would answer - yes, definitely, we need new projects. Just to give an example - I like the idea of Wikitravel, and it could be a good addition of a project which deals with pretty special information (like Wikispecies) and could have a success. But Wikitravel already exists, and, do we like it or not, we are not going to have the second Wikitravel under the WMF umbrella. Same with wikia project: it could be a good idea to have a separate WMF project for say manga fans, which could have more relaxed verifiability rules than WP, and then move a number of articles which get deleted from WP over there - but (presumably) this project already exists on wikia, and I do not see any point of moving it from commercial server to a non-commercial one. Thus, I agree with the majority: only if we have a brilliant idea for a project of smth which does not yet exist and is compatible with the WMF mission - we should create it, otherwise let it flourish on wikia.

Yaroslav Blanter17:51, 13 March 2010

I see the question as "what types of knowledge should we make sure is free", with "who hosts it" being a minor secondary question. We are considering long-term strategy for supporting our movement and the world's knowledge -- we should have a list of essential knowledge that should be free, and that can be built collaboratively. Something like Jimbo's "ten things that should be free", refined with time. If noone is addressing one of those issues in a free way, we should consider starting a project for it. If others are doing a good job, but not matching one or two of our core principles, we should work to help them improve their policies. If someone is doing a good job outside of WMF's umbrella, we should consider ways we can support them as a partner; and should work to making linking across our projects trivial.

Yes, projects should flourish wherever they have taken root -- the great thing about the movement we are part of is that it doesn't matter who hosts a project! But at the same time we can build a shared understanding of what the freely sharable knowledge in the world should look like in ten years. And if a project that we openly support / that is part of that long-term mission needs help in the future, or loses its current support or host, we should be in a position to embrace them under Wikimedia's umbrella.

Sj05:42, 16 March 2010

I love this as a frame, SJ. Let's start populating 10 things that need to be free and use this to do this analysis.

Eekim16:20, 17 March 2010