Strategic Planning

Proposal:Merging inactive wikiprojects of small languages

Status (see valid statuses)

The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

Every proposal should be tied to one of the strategic priorities below.

Edit this page to help identify the priorities related to this proposal!


  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content
  3. Increase Participation
  4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
  5. Encourage Innovation



Summary

A suggestion for supporting rather inactive wikiprojects in small languages: merge wikipedia, wiktionary, wikisource, wikinews etc. in language xy into one xy project.


Proposal

Today WMF supports different projects in more than 260 languages: Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikiversity, etc. These different projects could have been created because the community of English, German, French projects have been huge enough to split up different projects with different main focusses.

While Wikipedias are very successfull projects in many languages, other projects are often not that active.

Even European languages with an active Wikipedia project like Dutch may have problems to keep other projects alive (see Dutch Wikinews).

The aim of this proposal is to help small language communities with different wikiprojects in keeping them alive by merging all projects into one wikiproject. By merging into one project editors and readers could be focussed on one project. Also the problem of fighting vandalism could be reduced because vandalism in different wikiprojects could be seen in one "recent changes"-list.

For all languages, which have an active Wikipedia, this could be a way to keep and support other wikiprojects, which are requested for deleting.

For Wikipedias with a small community this could be a way to get more active users.

This could also be a suggestion for requests for new projects in small languages, if there is no active community in a test project on incubator after some time (before rejecting the request).

Example: Alemannic Wikipedia

For this proposal Alemannic Wikipedia could be a model:

The Alemannic community had four projects in 2007:

  • Alemannic Wikipedia
  • Alemannic Wiktionary
  • Alemannic Wikisource
  • Alemannic Wikiquote

The community of active users is rather small even in Alemannic Wikipedia, the other projects were nearly inactive. So Alemanic Wp community decided to merge all four projects into one project, and open seperate namespaces for the different projects:

  • Alemannic Wikipedia: Main
  • Alemannic Wiktionary: Wort
  • Alemannic Wikisource: Text
  • Alemannic Wikiquote: Spruch

An Alemannic Wikinews project was opened as Portal:Dialäkt-Neuigkeite.


Motivation

Supporting small languages


Key Questions

Potential Costs

no costs


References

Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:Merging inactive wikiprojects of small languages.

Want to work on this proposal?

  1. --Holder 13:42, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
  2. --Saeed.Veradi 22:13, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
  3. .. Sign your name here!
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