Cross-project comparisons

This page is to collect any efforts people have made to compare how different Wikimedia projects perform different tasks. This can be software design, community approach, policies, etc. Comparisons can be made across language communities within one project such as Wikipedia/Wikisource/Wikiquote/etc, or across projects within one language community (such as EN, DE, ZH), or both.

The benefit of comparing projects is to pool resources and learn from good examples of other people's work that you might not otherwise be exposed to.

In April 2007, the most significant effort was started with Category:Wikipedia_history to document unique practices in each Wikipedia.

See also:

• Statistics
• Wikimedia Embassy
• WikiLifeCycle
• url2bmp (or png) - extremely easy to use screenshot program, good for making quick visual comparisons

Software

All projects use the same version of MediaWiki. However, settings vary, e.g.:

• case-sensitivity of first letter of page title

Embedding images across projects, and embedding content on image pages, is possible if the image is on Commons.

Main page

See Erik Zachte's gallery (warning: 15mb page). 214 Wikipedia 'Main Pages', reduced to 40% size, taken on December 30, 2005.

Welcome messages

See /MediaWiki:Welcomecreation and Template:Welcome comparisons

Future possibilities

• Copyright warnings: MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning / MediaWiki:Edittools
• New page creation: MediaWiki:Noarticletext / MediaWiki:Newarticletext
• Search: MediaWiki:Searchnoresults / MediaWiki:Searchresulttext, others?
• Uploading: MediaWiki:Uploadtext / MediaWiki:Licenses (esp. useful for promoting Commons -- see w:fr:MediaWiki:Uploadtext for a great example)
• User signup process
• Deletion process

See also

• Template:Ilm