Talk:Wikimedia Foundation Community Affairs Committee/Procedure for Sibling Project Lifecycle

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Review

This is a community review of the procedure for Sibling Project Lifecycle. This review will be open from 13 May to 23 June. Participants are asked to read the information and share thoughts below or in live sessions.

Live sessions

Participants are invited to attend live sessions to provide input into this process. These sessions will be conducted in groups and the language will be English. The calls will be supported by Wikimedia Foundation staff, as well as the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.

The live sessions will be held on Zoom. All community members in good standing will be able to participate there. Request the Zoom link by emailing askcacwikimedia.org and mention which call you would like to attend. We will send out the links to everyone who has registered via email 24 hours before the call.

Participants are also welcome to request a conversation and share their thoughts during Talking:2024.

Call 1: 23 May 2024 at 02:00 UTC

• --Rosiestep (talk) 17:57, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
• add your name here

Etherpad notes:

Call 2: 30 May 2024 at 16:00 UTC

Etherpad notes:

Comments

Please read the information and share thoughts below.

Opening new projects

• The document does not specify the need for a new sibling project to include only such materials as are free licensed. I the WMF is committed to providing free-licensed knowledge, this ought to be mentioned explicitly. If the focus of the Foundation is to provide free knowledge, then this is a fact I might have missed but such a shift might result in some backlash from long-standing community members. Thus, I suggest stating free licensed content in the Legal and Copyright compliance section. Wojciech Pędzich Talk 06:42, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

  We do have the possibility of a fair use rationale, so technically this is not as clear cut as it seems. I'd be weary to put restrictions on things like this upfront that limit our flexibility and would suggest making a reference to the mission of the foundation instead as well as making one of the project proposal requirements to list the license intended to be used for the content. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:03, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

  Fair Use is a one-land-only-"solution", not an international acceptable one.

  Ditch the monolingual anglophone blinders and work only on real free content. Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 12:45, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

wikimed also uses fair use. ditch the license purity, which also sometimes flouts the "that are in the public domain in at least the United States and in the source country of the work." --Slowking4 (talk) 13:54, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

I would expect that to fall under the requirement to "Ensure the project aligns with the Wikimedia Foundation's mission of promoting free knowledge", because a project with no free knowledge isn't promoting free knowledge. But I agree that it should be listed as an explicit condition. Perhaps something like "Produces content under a suitable free license" would work. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:15, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

• The information is clear in that there are a number of requirements that have to be fulfilled in order to start a new sibling project. However, the effects of a sibling can be much huge on our projects. In the past both Commons and Wikidata have proven this point. They brought savings and new opportunities. The problem with some proposed projects are that they may be overly ambitious and/or that they do not consider fully what they may bring to particularly Wikipedia. Wikicite for instance is all about the sum of all scientific papers. When the ambition is tempered to all citations in any Wikipedia, it brings with it the notion that we continuously maintain the linked data to those cited papers, we will know the extend literature progressed from what Wikipedia reflects. It makes for a tool that supports any and all editors of a Wikipedia. My point is that perfection is likely the enemy of what we could achieve when we seek added value in our chain of projects. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 16:29, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

• I would like to see more help for potential new projects with an incubator space, such as wikispore, rather than emphasizing a gatekeeping checklist. I would like to see more tools and help for community incubation, growth and leadership, including soft skills. --Slowking4 (talk) 14:00, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Closing projects

It would be good to clarify how the closing procedure should work for projects with multiple language versions. Will each language version be assessed on its own merits, or could it happen that the whole sibling project is shut down and merged if some of its language versions are not up to the standard? The latter option is clearly undesirable, at least from the perspective of the small communities. --Alexander (talk) 17:09, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Other comments

• I think the terms "sibling projects" and "sister projects" are not very universal. For example in Chinese "sibling" would be a combination word from "big-brother little-brother big-sister little-sister" which is somewhat annoying. Also I wonder how this would work in languages which disamguate sisters and brothers through grammatical gender. Also, currently "sister projects" seems to mean "other WMF projects" which this document refers to as "sibling projects." This de facto name change would be confusing. --魔琴 (talk) 09:44, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

  You might need a term in Chinese that is not a literal translation. I don't see that as a problem, as long as it ends up with the same meaning vis a vis projects. I do agree with you, though, that we have long used "sister" and if we are changing to "sibling" there ought at least to be a clear rationale for that. - Jmabel (talk) 17:35, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

  The "sibling projects" defined here are in fact called "sister projects" on the English Wikipeda, where the most common way of referring to localisations is "language projects" (>1000 instances, unambiguously in this context). A search for "sibling projects" on the same project reveals barely over 100 instances, many from a single transcluded text, and with more ambiguity. A search for "sister projects" reveals >10,000 instances, but with the highest ambiguity. May I recommend sister projects (Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikidata et cetera) and the more specific language projects (en, de, fr et cetera)? The procedure page should be moved to Wikimedia Foundation Community Affairs Committee/Procedure for Sister Project Lifecycle, leaving a redirect. Иованъ (talk) 18:12, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

  @Jmabel, I believe the rationale is only to avoid using gendered language in English. Translators should probably use whatever terminology is common in the Wikipedia for that language (see the end of d:Q10823887 for some options). WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:06, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

  If the rationale is indeed to avoid using gendered language, then it ought to be pointed out that the feminine construction is already exponentially more common in English than the collective construction. That is why you see "sister projects" >10,000 separate times, "sibling projects" <100 separate times, and "brother projects" exactly 0 times. Иованъ (talk) 20:03, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

• Not that I think it's planned, but since it was given as an example: as a representative of the Wikibase Community User Group, terminating or significantly altering a product like Wikibase or (perhaps more likely, since it has issues with use of unsupported technology) the associated Wikidata Query Service could have a similar impact to closing a project, even though this impact may be more diffuse. Efforts should be made to reach out in a similar way to external stakeholders, rather than just thinking about Wikimedia's use of the technology. It may also be worth considering where technology-based services run by affiliates like Wikibase.cloud fall within this procedure. What would happen if an affiliate disagreed with the CAC? GreenReaper (talk) 22:16, 21 May 2024 (UTC)
• The majority of languages do not have a single word for "sibling", employing "brother or sister" instead. Even larger languages tend to lack such a term. For example, among Slavic languages only two neologisms are universally understood: Czech/Slovak (sourozenec/súrodenec) and Polish (rodzeństwo). If you look at the translations section of the English Wiktionary article, you will quickly notice the inexact nature of many translations, typically coded for gender and/or age. Иованъ (talk) 11:27, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Structural question

In the section on closing projects, under "Identify the need", is it deliberate that the last three bullet points are subordinate to "Severe lack of community activity" or were they intended to be at the same level? If this was deliberate, I don't understand why only if there is a severe lack of community activity would unresolvable legal issues be a reason to shut down a project. - Jmabel (talk) 03:28, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Jmabel you are right, corrected, thank you for noticing! -- NTymkiv (WMF) (talk) 09:35, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Scope

Overall, my mental model for this is to imagine that someone wants to open a Wiki Oral History (for the new project creation process) or to close Wikinews or Wikispecies (for the closing process). That is, looking at the projects listed at the bottom of the Meta-Wiki Main Page, I assume that this is about the "Content projects specialized by linguistic edition" and "Multilingual content projects" and not about the "Outreach and administration projects" or "Technical and development projects". It might be appropriate for this to be clarified. If this process is supposed to be used for everything, then that should be made clear, and the stakeholders (e.g., WMF Tech, which is replacing the existing Phabricator project with something else) notified. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:17, 22 May 2024 (UTC)