Sister Projects Committee
 |  This page is currently a draft. More information pertaining to this may be available on the talk page. Translation admins: Normally, drafts should not be marked for translation. |
This page provides information about the proposed committee responsible for creating and reviewing sister projects.
We are currently in the phase of drafting and reviewing policies. Have a look at, help to write, and add your ideas to:
- Sister Projects Committee/Draft charter
- New projects process
- Proposals for new projects + Currently-active proposals
See also: Category:Sister projects committee, Sister Projects Committee/Overview
- A IRC channel exists at #wikimedia-SPcomconnect.
- Mailing list spcom.
A sister projects committee is a proposed community committee that would be responsible for developing a clear policy and documentation for creating and reviewing sister projects. This would include adopting non-Wikimedia projects, and supporting and coordinating new project proposals to help them be successful; as well as considering requests to close, merge, or spin off existing sister projects.
For similar community committees whose processes we could learn from, see the Language committee and the Affiliations committee.
Current new project process
There is currently hardly a process to deal with New project proposals. That page lists things about gathering support for a proposal, and suggests criteria for interest and support that should be met before a proposal is reviewed. The 'review' step once a project meets those criteria needs to be worked out. [Historically it has only happened via a site-wide RfC and a cross-project discussion and vote; which is hard to launch and a lot of work.]
Current projects
Related discussion and suggestions
A recent thread on Foundation-l discussing the need for such a committee noted relevant categories and topics:
- communication and overviews
- - "project interviews" : talk to each project and identify the support that its community expects from the WMF and from other Projects. We all often hear that everything-other-than-en.WP-is-ignored but if we had some published/agreed expectations that would make it much easier to see what was needed.
- - "project reviews" : review how each project is working, and what open problems it has; is it growing or not, does it have other perennial problems. identify needs and possibilities. "what would an evaluation of Wikinews or Wikispecies say? Should we shut down such a project... cease to mention it on Wikipedia main pages... or invest money in promoting it?"
- naming, branding, visibility
- - naming conventions: rename Commons to "WikiCommons"? claim wikispecies.org?
- - branding and cross-wiki promotion: have a WMF brand easily visible on every project header? Link visibly to all sister projects from the bottom of the sidebar / bottom nav?
- merge considerations
- - merge WikiSpecies -- w/ WikiData, or back into Wikipedia?
- - merge-or-spinoff considerations: wikieducator and wikiversity have the same mission, and would benefit from being merged; 'who hosts the site' is a minor issue compared to the loss of splitting energy and focus across two wikis.
- - merge meta wikis: Outreach + Strategy + MetaWiki into wikimedia.org? (proposal, discussion)
- improvements and feature requests
- - "easy improvements with high value". Start with Wiktionary
- - lower barriers b/t wikis: global userpages, talk, watchlists. help valuate, prioritize and organize these feature requests
- related research
- Eloquence's presentation at Wikimania 2010 on sister projects
- annual cycles, trying new things
- "Although our flagship project is highly successful, it would be good if we try to keep creating new communities. I have been sad for quite a while now that we don't create new projects any more. It would be great to see one new project every year :)"
- "I had suggested earlier that we might even run this as an annual thing, with a Wikimania-style bidding process for the new sister projects."
Participants
Current
This is still a draft committee; the members below are the first active participants. Please list your interest and get involved on the talk page and the task list!
| Member | Languages | Location (time zone) | Background |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abigor | NL, en-3 de-2 | Netherlands | LangCom member, incubator and mediawiki administrator |
| Amqui | fr, frc-4, en-4, es-1, it-1 | Canada (UTC-7, -6 in Summer) | Wikipedist since 2006. See crossWikiness. Have been a steward. Sysop on 3 small wikipedias and creator and contributor on several test-wikipedias of the Incubator (and test-sysop on some of them). Editor on French Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikinews and Wiktionary (also sysop on the last three) as well as Commons, Meta and English Wikipedia. Experience with French Wikiversity and Wikiquote as well as OmegaWiki, TranslateWiki and OpenStreetsMap outside WMF. Small contributions on a lot of other projects and involved in outreach as part of the Canadian Aboriginal Languages Wikipedia Coordination. Member of Wikimedia Canada. Easily reachable on IRC. |
| Étienne Beaulé (Ebe123) | fr, en-5, frc-3, it-1, qu-1 | Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada (UTC-3) | Wikipedist since 2010. Sysop at 2 wikis (incubator and strategy). Observer of LangCom. |
| Fajro | es, eo-2, en-2 | Buenos Aires, Argentina (UTC-3) | Wikipedist since 2004. Founding member of Wikimedia Argentina. Observer in Langcom. Wikignome. |
| GChriss | en | United States (UTC-4) | Wikimedian since 2006. Most known for OpenMeetings.org (an active proposal) and to a lesser degree, the Penn State Wiki |
| James Heilman (Jmh649) | English and some French | Canada but work shift work | Wikipedian since 2007, Admin on EN, Founding member of Wikimedia Canada and Wiki Project Med Foundation |
| John Vandenberg | en | Armidale, Australia (UTC+10) | Wikis since 2006. Founding member and current president of Wikimedia Australia. |
| Patricio Molina (Mahadeva) | es, en-3 | Buenos Aires, Argentina (UTC-3) | Bureaucrat in Wikipedia en español since 2006. Board member in Wikimedia Argentina since its foundation in 2007. |
| MF-Warburg | de, en-3, fr-1, tet-1, la-1 | North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany (UTC+2:00) | contributing to Wikipedia, a long time ago also to Wikibooks. Bureaucrat on Incubator, member of Langcom, therefore very interested in making use of the experience from there in the process of approving new projects. |
| Mono | en, es-3, fr-1 | United States | I do stuff. |
| OhanaUnited | en, zh | Canada (UTC-5) | Bureaucrat at Wikispecies, regional ambassador for Canada Education Program, OTRS member. Have a few agreements with academic journals lined up ready to release their images in CC-3.0. Actively trying to recruit academics/students to contribute beyond just Wikipedia. |
| Richard Knipel (Pharos) | en | Brooklyn, New York (UTC-5) | Admin on English Wikipedia / Meta / Commons, dabbler in others. Currently president of Wikimedia New York City. |
| PiRSquared17 | en, fr-2, it-1, la-1, lt-0.5 (read most Rom. langs) | Admin on Meta, global sysop, interested in this proposal. Would probably only be an observer. | |
| Przykuta | pl, en-2 | Częstochowa, Poland | From pl Wikimedia projects (mostly Wikipedia, Wikinews), Commons, backstage projects too. |
| Marcin Cieślak (Saper) | pl, en, de, ru | Usually between 8° E and 21° E in the northern hemisphere. | Coming from plwikipedia mostly. Active developer of MediaWiki and some extensions. Keen user of wikisource. Gave up on wiktionary long time ago. Easily reachable via IRC. |
| Samuel Klein (Sj) | en, de-2, es-2, fr-2 | Cambridge, Massachusetts | From meta and en:wp, have contributed bits to wb, ws, wv, wn, wikt, commons, wikispecies. (sorry wq) Interested in wikidata, wikischolar, omegawiki, rodovid, wikikids. |
| Paweł Zienowicz (Sp5uhe) | pl, en-2 | Warszawa, Poland | OTRS-member, MediaWiki translator Bureaucrat on pl-wikiquote, pl-wikisource, SysOp on pl-wikibooks, pl-wikimedia, pl-wikinews, pl-wikiquite, pl-wikisource, pl-wiktionary |
| Thehelpfulone | en, es-2, fr-2 | London, United Kingdom (UTC+1) | Admin on the English Wikipedia, admin & crat at Meta, OTRS agent and Langcom Observer. You can usually find me in most Wikimedia IRC channels as Thehelpfulone when I'm online. |
| Ziko van Dijk (Ziko) | |||
| Aschmidt (Aschmidt) | Germany, UTC+2 | Pls. cf. my user page. | |
| Odisha1 | w:India, (UTC+5:30) | ||
| Hubertl | de, en-3, es-1 | Austria, UTC+2 | Active since 2004, de:WP, Commons, Wikisource. Permanent Wikipedian in residence, since 2012. My focus is on community work, especially the courting of new authors and collaborations with external institutions. |
| Micru | ca, es, en-3, de-2, fr-2 | Montreal, UTC-5/-4 | Wikisource User Group |
| LauraHale | en | Spain, UTC+2 | Mostly active on Wikinews, and English Wikipedia |
| Base (talk) | uk, ru-4, en-2. Can read be, be-tarask. | EET (UTC+2), EEST (UTC+3) in summer time | Currently ukwn and ukwq sysop; Was or is invlved in voy, wd, commons and wp as well |
Task list
Here is a laundry list of potential tasks. Please add your own, and mark them as important/unimportant, and in/out of scope. Take the /Draft charter in mind.
- Positional issues
- Defunct private wikis: grants.wikimedia.org (private, rarely used, unused since 2005), spcom (special projects committee, unused since 2006), &c
- Single-purpose, now dormant wikis: ten.wikimedia.org, sep11 wiki, &c.
- Periodic wikis: wikimania2005–wikimania2012
- Combining meta discussions: Strategy, Outreach, Meta
- Better plan for custom Meta namespaces: Grants, Research, &c?
- Topic-specific issues
- Conference proceedings and research papers on wikis - where do they go? See recent proposal for a conferences wiki extension; OpenMeetings.org (proposed as a sister project); &c.
- See also Acawiki / WikiScholar proposals
- Coordinating wiktionary with omegawiki.org: This was the original goal of omegawiki, the community still wants it; it addresses an underlying technical data-structure weakness.
- Coordinating wikispecies (monolingual) with species data on wikipedia (multilingual). Merge? More formalized plan for coordination with Encyclopedia of Life (many of whose contributors edit wikispecies too).
- Claiming the wikispecies.org domain: how important is this?
- Translations: Meta, translatewiki, interlanguage links... all are used in some way by translators. How should this work?
- Data issues
- Which of the above questions has an answer that may be modified once wikidata is fully functional?
- Is download.wikimedia.org in scope for this group?
- Functional issues
- A prioritized bug list for each sister project? (e.g. oldwikisource:WS:BUGS) Large-scale questions? Ex: the 100MB file size limit on Commons (unchanged in 5 yrs!), the lack of a public image dump for Commons, proofreading extensions for wikisource, custom dual-category lists for wikinews.
- Summarizing expectations each project has of the WMF
- Summarizing expectations projects have of one another [esp. when they rely on eachother], and that WMF and readers have of projects
- Defining the spectrum of support options for projects by Wikimedia: from minor traffic generation/grants for Movement Partners, to vanilla hosting on the Labs/toolserver of a protoproject, to inclusion as WMF Project (with SUL, suffrage in global votes, adherence to shared principles).
- Project plans
- Projects that pass initial milestones for being added as a sister project should have some sort of roadmap or project plan, before final adoption. See for instance Commons:Project_plan.