Wikimedia Foundation Community Affairs Committee/Procedure for Sibling Project Lifecycle/Invitation for feedback

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This message, "Feedback invited on Procedure for Sibling Project Lifecycle", was sent by Victoria Doronina on 13 May 2024.

Dear all, I am writing on behalf of the Community Affairs Committee of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees to invite you to give feedback on the draft Procedure for Sibling Project Lifecycle from today until the end of the day on June 23, 2024 (anywhere on Earth). This is a long read; thank you in advance for your attention to its details.

Terminology: what are “Sibling Projects”?

The term “Sister Project” has historically been used to describe all the publicly available wikis (“Wikimedia Projects”) operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, including Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and others [1]. Some community members have also used the term “Sister Project” in the context of language versions of the same wiki, such as English Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, etc., or Vietnamese Wikisource, Catalan Wikisource, etc. Still, other community members have interpreted “Sister Projects” as synonymous with “WikiProjects”, such as English:Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history or Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings.

To address the confusion and to disambiguate the terms, a working term - “Sibling Projects” - will be used to distinguish separate content projects (wikis) from language variants of the same content project. Under this naming scheme, Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikidata are “Sibling Projects”. Thus, the French Wikisource and Polish Wikisource would be “language versions (French and Polish) of the same Sibling Project (Wikisource)”. This is a working terminology, and it might change.

Context

Historically, when Wikimedia Siblings started to be added to Wikipedia, there was a surge of new projects, sometimes with and sometimes without strategic or clear goals. At that time, the Wikimedia Foundation Board was approving new Sibling projects (for example, Wikivoyage [2], Abstract Wikipedia [3]). There is a separate committee (Language Committee) that makes decisions on whether a new language version (subdomain) of existing Wikimedia projects can be opened [4]. Still, there was nothing for other “kinds of Wikimedia projects”. Since 2021, the responsibility to “address new (...) site applications, including creating a formalized procedure, from application to approval/disapproval” is the mandate of the Community Affairs Committee (CAC), a Wikimedia Foundation Board Committee [5].

In the last 10 years, the Wikimedia Foundation Board has become cautious about opening new Sibling Projects because of a lack of clear strategy around approval, maintenance, and closure, a lack of understanding of their impact, and questions around their sustainability in light of the Foundation's mostly flat budget [6]. In addition, the technical work necessary to maintain different Sibling Projects has often stretched the Wikimedia Foundation’s capacity.

A little over a year ago, CAC created a Task Force to help the Wikimedia Foundation develop a direction on if, how, what, and when to invest in the opening of new Sibling Projects, in order “to make sure that any newly approved project is set up for success, and has the resources it needs to function well” [7]. The Foundation needs to understand better what services it would need to commit to this process while taking into account the organization's limited capacity and budget. This task has to be addressed in cooperation with the Product & Technology Department of the Wikimedia Foundation, led by the Chief Product & Technology Officer, Selena Deckelmann.

Assessment

To make space for the inflow of innovative ideas while maintaining and continuing support for the existing Sibling Projects, it is important to establish a clear process for the Sibling Projects’ lifecycle.

The application evaluation process preceding “opening a new Sibling Project” will require considerable time as well as financial and human resources, which needs quantification. An assessment of the needed investment in the technology could be significant depending on the scope of the proposed project (for example, Wikifunctions needs very different resources than a new project that uses standard mediawiki installations), especially in cases of possible maintenance of the project in perpetuity. Evaluating a new application to validate the concept, its impact on the existing Wikimedia technical ecosystem, the human and financial resourcing implications, and future maintenance costs will be time-consuming and might need considerably more staff.

At the same time, an evaluation of the existing Sibling Projects needs to occur as not all are meeting their potential with promoting the Movement's mission. We need to develop an evaluation process for a Sibling Project's success and sustainability. We also need clearly defined approaches for splitting, merging, sunsetting, and/or possibly adopting Sibling Projects by different organisations.

How to provide feedback

Your feedback is warmly welcome. The feedback can be given from today until the end of the day on June 23, 2024 (anywhere on Earth). We hope that a fairly long feedback period will allow for rich discussions without feeling rushed. There are several ways that you can provide feedback:

Review the page here [8], on Meta and leave comments on the talk page.

Join open calls (May 23 at 02:00 to 03:00 UTC and May 30 at 16:00 to 17:00 UTC) [9]

Request a conversation as a part of Talking:2024 by using the Let’s Talk feature to sign up for a time to speak with me and other trustees about this topic.

Kind regards,

Victoria Doronina, Task Force Lead

On behalf of the Community Affairs Committee of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees --Victoria (talk) 12:01, 13 May 2024 (UTC)