Public consultation about Wikispore

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The application to consider Wikispore as a new Sister Project was submitted in 2019. SPTF decided to review this request in more depth because, rather than focusing on a specific topic, as most proposals for the new Sister Projects do, Wikispore has the potential to nurture multiple start-up Sister Projects.

After careful consideration, the SPTF has decided not to recommend Wikispore as a Wikimedia Sister Project. Considering the current activity level, the current arrangement allows better flexibility and experimentation while WMF provides core infrastructural support.

We acknowledge the initiative's potential and seek community input on what would constitute a sufficient level of activity and engagement to reconsider its status in the future. As part of the process, we shared the decision with the Wikispore community and invited one of its leaders, Pharos, to an SPTF meeting.

Currently, we especially invite feedback on measurable criteria indicating the project's readiness, such as contributor numbers, content volume, and sustained community support. This would clarify the criteria sufficient for opening a new Sister Project, including possible future Wikispore re-application. However, the numbers will always be a guide because any number can be gamed.

Wikispore

Please provide any feedback on the measurable criteria for reviewing new Wikimedia projects.

At what level of the project should the proposal be escalated to the Board?

Please comment at Talk:Public consultation about Wikispore.

16th July, 11 am UTC Event:Community consulation on Wikispore/Wikinews, call 1

17th July, 16 pm UTC Event:Community consulation on Wikispore/Wikinews, call 2

a platform for small-scale experimentation

Wikispore is by its very nature a rather dispersed effort, a platform for small-scale experimentation among the different thematic "spores", rather than a single grand product. Its untapped potential can only be fully realized with total integration into the wider Wikimedia ecosystem, so that it can be a ready appendix to sister projects like Wikipedia and Wikidata. But of course the Wikimedia Foundation has expressed a desire for a flagship product with a high activity level to demonstrate viability, and so our community has consciously transitioned from a focus on a series of mini-experiments to a more strategic effort to find and support such a flagship product. A flagship seen as successful by the Wikimedia Foundation should lead to recognition as a sister project proper, and ultimately enable a much more fruitful season of renewed and diverse experimentation after approval.

In anticipation of the sister projects process, each of the past two years our Wikispore community has pushed for developing and supporting a potential strategic flagship, at first seeking funding support from the Wikimedia Foundation, and the second and current effort with independent funding support.

2024: wikispore:Geo Spore, meant to be developed with support from Grants:Project/MSIG/Wikispore Wiki.NYC Map (due to confused Wikimedia Foundation communication, we spent more than 6 months waiting for determination on this, the project being declared alternately eligible and ineligible for this type of grant).
2025: wikispore:Art Spore, currently planned to be developed with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

As to the desired activity level, the ~80 active users currently at Wikifunctions would seem to be an appropriate point of comparison, considering that is a large centrally-supported project. We look forward to reapplying in 2026!--Pharos (talk) 11:46, 27 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Should allow BLPs

In my long time experience as a Wikimedian, a very obvious use of Wikispore would be to create small bios for living people that are somewhat notable, but not that notable or notable for Wikipedia - something between Wikidata and Wikipedia. Unfortunately this seems to be forbidden by design. It's difficult to take off a project when it's main application and point of attraction has been turned off by design. - Darwin ^Ahoy! 16:25, 29 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I guess you're referring to wikispore:Bio Spore, which was meant less as a permanent rule, than as a guideline during an initial phase. The thought being to emphasize extra vigilance around privacy issues, until such time as we had a sufficient social infrastructure in place to support us covering a more difficult topic area. This was actually intended in part to make Wikimedia Foundation approval easier, though if they have a different preference we'd welcome hearing it. Pharos (talk) 21:46, 29 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There are so few people discussing this...

The existence of this thing itself has its rationality, just like the incubator. But at least I think that expressions like launching several sister projects every year should not be used. After all, we can't even protect the existing projects. Who can say it? ~ Sheminghui.WU (talk) 04:29, 30 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In addition, this thing is not very well known in the community. Is it really meaningful to open a public consultation like this? ~ Sheminghui.WU (talk) 04:30, 30 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This page is not even on the front page like Wikinews do?? ~ Sheminghui.WU (talk) 04:31, 30 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a good chance for the wider community to become ware of it. Victoria (talk) 13:09, 1 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I’m glad it’s on the front page now. Sheminghui.WU (talk) 06:12, 5 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Shared procedures

Maybe im being nitpicky, but from the report

This allows it to operate within current frameworks, in theory making it easier to
maintain because it builds on the technical and organizational framework already established by Wikimedia, including shared server resources, security protocols, and maintenance practices.

That's not true. It uses separate server resources, separate maintenance and separate security protocols. Bawolff (talk) 05:01, 3 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The real problem that Wikispore is trying to solve

Wikispore is only a symptom. The real problem is the difficulty of opening and closing Wikimedia wikis. By "wikis", I mean wikis of all kinds—both editions of existing projects in different languages, and new wiki families with new kind of content and policies.

This used to be pretty easy in the 2000s, both technically and procedurally. Creation of Wikisource, Wikinews, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and Wikispecies were approved relatively easily. As far as I know, the Incubator was created in one afternoon without a lot of process because @Brooke Vibber thought that it's a good idea (do correct me if I'm wrong). The adoption of Wikivoyage was relatively easy, too.

But now, it's hard:

The technical procedure for creating wikis is too long, manual, and error-prone. @Ladsgroup, @Tim Starling, and other great engineers made it less horrible in the last few years, but it's still far longer and more complicated than creating a new wiki instance on external wiki farms such as Miraheze, Fandom, or Wikibase Cloud.
The community procedure for creating an edition of a wiki in a new language is sensible in principle, but has way too many manual and bureaucratic steps in practice. Being a member of the Language committee, I know it very well from the inside. It has seen some updates since the Language committee was created twenty years ago, but none of those updates was fundamental, and the procedure is mostly the same as it was when I joined in 2010.
Creating a new wiki family is theoretically possible, but almost never happens in practice now. Wikifunctions is repeatedly described as "the first new Wikimedia project since Wikidata", but actually, both Wikidata and Wikifunctions didn't begin as community initiatives, but as special projects. All other community proposals since Wikiversity (not counting Wikivoyage, which was adopted) just got stuck.
Closing wikis is much harder than it should be, too. Editions of Wikipedia, Wikibooks, or other projects that are problematic for some reason (spammy, hoaxy, biased, having too many bot edits, etc.) are sometimes closed, but the process is sluggish. Arguably, it should be done to many more failing wikis, but no one has the energy to invest in it because it's so damn hard.

And that, as far as I can see, is the real issue that Wikispore is kind of trying to solve.

The actual success of the wikis that were created easily in the 2000s is up to debate. In my impression, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wiktionary, and Wikivoyage are quite successful and useful (in some languages), while Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and Wikispecies are less great. If you disagree with this assessment, it's fine; that's not the main point of this post. In fact, it's not a real problem that some projects are more successful and some are less; as long as the Wikimedia movement and the Wikimedia Foundation can bear the cost in dollars, in brand value, in server performance, and in community health, it's good to experiment with various things.

The main point of this post is not that Wikinews is worse and Wiktionary is better, but that opening and closing wikis is much harder than it should be, and because of this, experimentation with new things is practically impossible. Wikispore kind of tries to make this experimenting easier. Its success is limited because its technology is not as powerful as that of a real wiki on the Wikimedia cluster, but the fact that people are even trying to do this points to the real problem.

If anyone wants to hear my admittedly tentative opinion on whether Wikispore should be adopted as a full-fledged Wikimedia project or not, I'd say that yes, it should be. I didn't run the numbers very carefully, but by simple common sense, the cost of adopting it minimally as-is, without extra technical upgrades, is probably lower than the cost of adopting Wikivoyage in 2013 was.

But the thing that the Board and the Sister Projects Task Force should really think about seriously, is improving the process for opening and closing wikis and wiki families.

My favorite new kind of project, for example, would be to have specialized wiki encyclopedias that focus on certain topics. Note: "wiki encyclopedias" and not "Wikipedias"! They'd have basically the same technical setup as Wikipedia does, but unlike Wikipedia, which is a general encyclopedia, they'd focus on covering a certain country or city, a certain area of art, a certain science, etc., and they would do it in more detail than Wikipedia's notability guidelines allow. Wikipedia's notability guidelines are good for a general encyclopedia, but not so good for specialized topics.

Imagine, for example, a wiki encyclopedia of Johannesburg. It's one of the biggest cities in Africa, with a lot of neighborhoods, with a long history, and with diverse culture. It would be very useful to have it not only in English, but also in Zulu, Sotho, Tswana, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Venda, and other languages of the area; and why not also in Russian, French, and Chinese? In fact, it may happen that this wiki will attract more activity in Zulu and Tswana than the general Wikipedias in these languages do, because the topics will be relevant and there won't be a lot of notability and verifiability arguments. This, in turn, may later spill over to increasing activity in the Zulu and Tswana Wikipedias.

In addition, some of these encyclopedias can have a different policy about openness to edits. For example, they can limit editing only to verified experts on these topics. It would make them less of a wiki that absolutely anyone can edit, but it would perhaps make them reliable sources for the general Wikipedia, which, quite sensibly, prohibits open wikis as sources (at least in English). There can be other specific differences, too.

Maybe it will work, and maybe it won't, but it's worth to experiment with it. With the current way in which new wiki families are created in the Wikimedia world, however, even experimenting with such a thing is impossible. I've given an example of one city about which there can be a whole encyclopedia, but there are probably thousands of cities in the world that deserve to have an encyclopedia about them. Having a whole discussion about creating a wiki for each city on the Wikimedia platform is totally unreasonable with the current wiki creation procedure. And what if some of these wikis fail? It will be hard to delete them, too.

And a specialized encyclopedia is just one example of a project; there could be many more ideas, some of which may be quite different from Wikipedia.

But what if the procedure changed? What if creating and deleting wikis was automatic, easy, and cheap? That's what the Task Force and the Board should really talk about. I have some specific ideas for improvements, but this post is already way too long; ask me if you're curious.

Thank you for the miraculous people who read this ultra-long post till the end.

Disclaimer: I am a volunteer member of the Language committee and a staff member of the Wikimedia Foundation. While this comment may be somewhat informed by my experience in these two bodies, it does not represent their opinions, but only my own. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 21:18, 3 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Please note none of Wikimedia projects are designated to be reliable secondary sources. All are open wiki that everyone can edit. GZWDer (talk) 15:41, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Not designated by whom?

It's true that they are not reliable secondary sources now, but why can't it be changed? Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 16:01, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"Closing wikis" will become something very different if phab:T228745 is resolved, at that time projects hosted in Incubator will become independent wikis. GZWDer (talk) 15:43, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]