Talk:Wikispore Basic
Add topic- mentioned in an ongoing RFC: Sister Projects next steps
Gardening photo
[edit]Love it and see how it makes sense as metaphoric visual clue to me as WIKISPORE gardener :-)
If this proposal is to serve people who are not informed of WIKISPORE maybe more diagramatic illustration would be better? Zblace (talk) 03:36, 7 September 2025 (UTC)
Parallel with incubator
[edit]Can you elaborate on what this would look like in practice?
If the pilot is just going to be for a glam wikispore, you can make this clearer by focusing on just a single incubator subdomain for a single topic.
A: What would the differences be between "art.wikispore.org" [the eventual goal if wikispore became a sister project, AIUI] and "art.incubator.wikimedia.org"?
- What would creating a wiki as a subdomain of incubator.wikimedia.org entail and how would that make setting up a spore easier?
- (answer I received offline: a) wikis in production have default integration with certain other features that are useful; b) it is harder to add a new root domain like 'wikispore.org' to production than to add a new test wiki under a known root domain (like 'glam.incubator')
B: How does this proposal interact with current infrastructure? What work is involved with spinning up a Basic spore?
- To Zblace's suggestion about visuals: could you diagram the universe of spores, where they fit into existing infrastructure, and what features / affordances they would have based on where they were hosted?
- If the glam pilot was retired or refactored after two years, what do you expect would happen to it? (would it be closed / return to being a namespace on wikispore.org?)
- What level of activity/completeness would you expect before the current Art spore transitioned from a namespace on wikispore.org to having its own wiki?
–SJ talk 19:56, 8 September 2025 (UTC)
Parallels with Wikispore.org
[edit]Currently wikispore.org (which redirects to wikispore.wmflabs.org) is an incubator for a range of Spores, such as the Art spore (which currently includes around 20 short pages).
How would a new GLAM wikispore interact with wikispore.org?
- Is there a standard level of activity above which you encourage spores to find standalone hosts or site?
- Would the GLAM project develop its initial templates and styles on Wikispore, as STARDIT did, before migrating to its own wiki?
- Would the Art: and other pages on wikispore.org remain there after separate wiki was started, similar to the language incubator?
The description here of Wikispore Basic is also just a bit too brief, and deserves elaboration! From a conversation with Pharos this week: I see at least two ways to read the proposal:
- A) that Wikispore Basic will be a GLAM "phase" of the idea of Wikispore itself: an in-production branch of Wikispore limited to GLAM topics, since that is where there is a lot of latent demand for a more hospitable place for GLAM initiatives and wikimedians in residence to organize their work without worrying about having to defend contributions against overzealous deletion.
- B) that Wikispore Basic is the "standard option" for a wiki project hoping to graduate into its own site in the wider wiki-world: if you can fit your project into a standard-sized package, it's that much easier to get off the ground / map losslessly to common hosting options. And as a pilot of this option, a specific GLAM-focused spore, which is already underway, will demonstrate how it could graduate from a set of pages on wikispore.org to its own simple standalone wiki.
At any rate, performance of the wiki at wikispore.org has been patchy at times, so any pilot should have more reliable hosting to ensure that site performance isn't a confound in evaluating its success. –SJ talk 01:12, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
Questions about fragmentation vs. critical mass
[edit]In general, how are you all thinking about maintaining a critical mass of activity, rallying people together / making this a better place to do GLAM work than the places people are currently using, and supporting multilingual participation?
A good destination site is one where the focus on a class of work inspires more people to join and reduces bounces of people who came looking for that sort of work and run into a community focused on other things (and perhaps confused about the sort of work they are doing). For instance, a number of WIR and GLAM initiatives on Commons run into copyright-licensing debates rather than collaborative engagement because there are many more workflows and scripts for license clearance than for GLAM augmentation or "Sum of All *" projects.
On the other hand, today people work on GLAM projects on their home wiki; on Commons itself; on Wikidata; on Meta; on the wiki of their regional affiliate (if it is largely a partnership project). Would this become yet another place for that work? An index pointing out to all such efforts? A better place than some of the above to actually lay out project pages + policies + workflows and do the relevant editing + data/metadata curation + media curation? –SJ talk 00:28, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
Basic site performance
[edit]Right now production wikis have a very high bar for performance and availability. Meanwhile wikispore.wmflabs.org has been giving me various errors for the past hour. Perhaps there could be some level of service in between the two for pilot wikis such as this -- good enough to sustain a community of regular editors without frustrating them.
