Wikispore Basic

Gardening on pilot mode.

Wikispore Basic is a proposed 2-year test period for Wikispore flagship efforts to be hosted as content on the production server. It could be reached from wikispore.org, but on the backend would be under a subdomain of an existing project, likely Wikimedia Incubator. After this time, the project would be reevaluated, and possibly either promoted to full Sibling Project, retired or refactored elsewhere.

Wikispore Basic's initial phase would be a GLAM pilot, it would not include any unconventional MediaWiki extensions.

GLAM pilot

The initial Wikispore Basic pilot at glam.incubator.wikimedia.org would build on a major GLAM research project supported by the Canadian government, with Wikispore as its primary place of publication.

Parallel: The History and Archives of Artist-Run Centres in Canada (Q135767262) is a 6-year research project to document the history of hundreds of Canadian artist-run centres, with its own funding for content and technical work coordinated with Wikimedia NYC. Development for the Canadian project will establish a basis for integration of wikispore:Art Spore and related GLAM initiatives, as art and archives have already been the most naturally fruitful areas for Wikispore over the years.

For this pilot, we are in touch with the larger GLAM community and WMF technical staff who can help implement this if it has approval of the relevant decision-makers.

Basic tech background

This concept has come together as a response to the public consultation about Wikispore, and particularly concern from the Sister Projects Taskforce that the current implementation of Wikispore has exotic MediaWiki extensions installed that are incompatible with the production server.

The Wikispore implementation on the production server would be complementary to the currently-existing, more technically adventurous, implementation on Wikimedia Cloud Services. Wikispore Basic would be vanilla software without any unconventional extensions, and could indeed be a testbed for the concept of bundling standard extensions for new wikis.