Community Wishlist/Wishes/Finish WikiProject X
Finish WikiProject X
Description
Wikipedia:WikiProject X was an ambitious effort to revitalise wikiprojects on the English Wikipedia supported by a series of project grants between 2014 and 2019. Its goal was:
- To address the causes of WikiProject failure on the English Wikipedia. By addressing these causes, we hope to increase the activity on WikiProjects and make WikiProjects more central to the experience of editing Wikipedia. This is based on the hypothesis that WikiProjects help facilitate Wikipedia-editing in a given subject area by organizing contributors around a cause and by providing resources and social support.
Two rounds of the project were completed and delivered several significant improvements to WikiProject infrastructure, e.g. CollaborationKit and a bot-maintained Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory. Unfortunately the third round completed without a deployed product, which led to the project stalling and those products that were delivered becoming unmaintained. In their final report, the WikiProject X team explained that the failure of the third round was primarily due to under-resourcing and summarised the outlook for the future as follows:
- WikiProject X, as a wider project, is not complete. The CollaborationKit MVP itself is not complete. This round of the project, in terms of the scope and especially quantity of what was funded, is complete, but there is a very clear point to pick up from. The code is there. The workboard describes the current status and blockers. These reports, and the project on the English Wikipedia, though somewhat out of date, respectively show the progress so far in terms of findings and community engagement.
- Any full properly equipped team could pick this project up and see it through to its proper end.
The wish here is that the WMF equip a team that can pick up the WikiProject X project and see it through to its proper end. If finished and maintained, it would represent a significant investment in a vital component of the English Wikipedia's collaborative infrastructure that has so far received very little attention or resources from the Foundation.
Assigned focus area
Unassigned.
Type of wish
Feature request
Related projects
Wikipedia
Affected users
WikiProject participants and content-focused editors of the English Wikipedia more broadly