Wikiscope

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

Wikiscope is a project proposal geared towards viewer-based Wikimedia project coordination.

Its mission is to make a viewer-based, easy to use coordination project which showcases and makes accessible all of the various Wikimedia projects.

Proposal[edit]

At the moment, there are several great Wikimedia projects, in many languages. I'm sure that you are familiar with all of them. However, the average user of, say, Wikipedia, does not know about some of these. They may be dimly aware of Wiktionary, but they often do not realise there are such things as Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikispecies, Wikiquote etc.

This ought to be remedied. This is not a proposal for a new project as such, but rather a viewer-based coordination site which showcases all the projects.

Viewers would come to the page and it would give them a view similar to the current English Wikipedia homepage. This would have the current featured articles/books/quotes from the various projects together. There would be a search function which would allow easy search through all the projects.

"So far, so good. But what about pages? This can't just be a Main Page, can it?" I hear you ask. No, I reply, it isn't. There are pages just like on the normal wikis. However, they do not have content, but links. Each page will represent a topic, such as "History of World War II", "Works by Shakespeare" and so on. The pages will be interlinked with each other and, more importantly, with the main projects. A page on "Works by Shakespeare" will link the viewer to Wikisource, for texts, to Wikipedia, for information, to Wikiquote, for quotes, and so on.

There would be language-specific versions of the project (as with others) which would do the same thing. They would, of course, link to each other.

I realise that this will require a lot of work, and I don't know if it is technically feasible (to have the featured page of one wiki appear automatically on another, for example). However, I think that this project, if approved and created, would drastically improve the number of viewers to other projects, and the public perception of Wikimedia as a whole.

Justification[edit]

  • Projects other than Wikipedia are currently not very visible or noticed.
  • There is not enough inter-project linking.
  • It is often hard to find material on a topic without knowing what to search for.
  • Inter-project linking solely based on an existing project will be less successful and will dilute the project it is on.

Key Features[edit]

  • Simple topic headings.
  • Links to information on all Wikimedia projects.
  • Main Page which showcases the best off each project.
  • Interwiki links to other language Wikiscope pages.

Glossary[edit]

  • viewer = a person who just uses and does not contribute to a Wikimedia project
  • user = a person who contributes to a Wikimedia project
  • project = a Wikimedia project (Wikipedia, Wiktionary etc.)
  • proposal = a project which has not been yet made official
  • inter-project link = a link between two projects
  • interwiki link = a link between to languages in a project
  • interlink = a link from one page to another in a project

Discussion[edit]

Proposed by[edit]

Alternative names[edit]

(see Wikiscope/Name)
  • Wikiscope
  • Wikiview
  • Wikiwatch
  • Wikshelf
  • Wikicue

Related projects/proposals[edit]

Domain names[edit]

  • en.wikiscope.org
  • de.wikiscope.org
  • etc.

Mailing list links[edit]

Demos[edit]

People interested[edit]