Create 2023/Sister projects: the past, present and glorious future: Submissions:2021/News On Wiki, Phase 2 complete

This submission has been accepted for WikiConference North America 2023.

ABSTRACT

In this session we will discuss and collect ideas about the lifecycle of sister projects, including: What should be the criteria for creating a new Wikimedia project? What do we expect from a Wikimedia project? And what kind of support and resources should a Wikimedia project expect? When a Wikimedia project is considered successful? What should be the criteria for closing an existing Wikimedia project? The discussion will inform the work of the Board of trustees’ Sister projects Task Force.

• Sister Projects Task Force
• Slidedeck

DESCRIPTION

For the last 15 years, the ecosystem of Wikimedia projects (also called Sister projects - like Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikiversity, etc.) has seen very few changes: only a few projects have been created, and none has been phased out, even though many proposals for new projects have been presented, and some ideas for changes in existing ones have been voiced.

In 2023, the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation began discussing this topic, with the goal of setting up processes for reviewing new project proposals and monitoring existing ones.

This session will be a group discussion aimed at collecting ideas for the work of the Sister projects task force. It will be introduced by a short (~10 minutes) presentation about the process, including an overview of the same-named session held in August at Wikimania.

Important note: the current focus of the Board is on designing general processes for creating, phasing out or rethinking projects, and not yet on decisions about specific projects. Specific proposals will not be discussed at this time, and no decisions will be made.