Task force/Recommendations/Local Language 7

Cooperation between different Wiki-projects at a meta

Outline

Question/Problem

Cooperation between different Wiki-projects at a meta.

Strategy

Contributors with specialist knowledge might be hindered from contributing to large language Wikipedias because the large language ain't his first language and he feels to insecure to use it. The contribution will then only benefit the small language Wikipedia and will remain in isolation because of the language barrier. Cooperation on global wikiprojects over the language borders, on a meta where experts in one subject but with many languages can join, could help pull such contributors out of isolation. Also multiple versions of the same topic in different languages are now created by each project inventing their own wheel. To bring people from different projects together can be done by giving meta a larger role in sharing experience and knowledge about community and project building. The page at meta can be the place where users from small projects can raise questions about content that can be discussed/answered by the experts of larger projects. Meta could host wiki-embassies and wikiprojects shared by multiple projects, corners where users from different projects can share information. Most contributors to meta are at the moment admins and wiki-politicians. The user type that adds content should be encouraged to join too. If a wikiproject exists at multiple projects (example: en|it|fr|pl|sv|pt|de|etc) an umbrella project page could be made at meta, where all discussions that don't exclusively have local importance should go. Meta-wikiprojects will also encourage participation in meta by the type of user that only adds content and isn't interested in wikipolitics. What here is meant by a wiki-embassy is not the thing found at many smaller projects, but a project page at meta where a local wiki presents itself (differences with other projects, what the community finds important, how they work, etc). Many wikis have different guidelines/rules, which can be confusing for a new user accustomed with another project. There should be an 'ambassador' for every project too, one (or more) user(s) to man the embassy. Their task would be to notice the local community when there are developments at meta and vice versa, and to write the yearly report.

The usefulness of coordination of such projects at a meta is however questioned, and what kind of material that would be interesting to present there is unclear. For projects undertaken by a single or a few editors the extra effort put into writing repports hardly will seem worthful to them, especially because the information has to be presented in another language than their own to be useful for others. And all projects not in the top 50 are likely to be projects where individuals may have a strong influence on a project. Anyway, some examples of data that could be of use is statistics (content/users/pages/vandalism) with some comments, local decisions/solutions about community problems.