Talk:Wikilabs

Questions

I believe the following questions need to be addressed before the Wikilabs idea is taken forward:

1. How is it decided that a new project may be part of Wikilabs?
2. How do you decide when a test wiki hosted at Wikilabs has failed and it is time to remove it?
3. What about the risks of breaking links?
4. How will different ideas be developed within the same wiki?
5. How will this content be moved to the real site if the idea turns out to be successful?
6. How many ideas will be accepted for the Wikilabs? (Wikicities has had over 120 requests for new wikis in the last three months. Wikimedia is far better known, so this number will be much larger if Wikilabs were part of Wikimedia.)

Angela 08:39, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The following are some answers concerning how I see Wikilabs, which is not necessarily in accordance with the proposer's ideas

Q: How is it decided that a new project may be part of Wikilabs?

A: I think that EVERY proposed project should be a part of Wikilabs. This is because no small group of people (such as those who read meta) is going to be able to guess what idea is going to take off. This, of course, will lead to difficulties finding useful projects amongst the useless ones. Presumably MediaWiki collects statistics, so it might be possible to rank the projects by activity.

The other advantage to accepting every project is that useful but irrelevant articles from other wikis (such as WikiBooks, which recently deleted WikiResearch, despite people finding it potentially useful, because it was not a text book) can still be accessed. The only down side I can think of is the amount of disk space to hold all of the articles, but unless the articles are devoted to images, sound, or scientific data sets (it might be necessary to specifically rule out these types of proposals from WikiLabs) I don't think this is a huge problem.

Q: How do you decide when a test wiki hosted at Wikilabs has failed and it is time to remove it?

A: If all of the ideas are sorted by activity, this is not necessary. The wikis that don't attract any attention will be sorted at the end of the list, where noone would need to see them, unless they were specifically searched for.

Q: How will different ideas be developed within the same wiki?

A: I'm not precisely sure what you mean. I envisage that the main page of wikilabs would contain a ranked list of projects, with perhaps a second list containing new project proposals. Each project name would link to a page that describes in detail what article is acceptable for that project, and some examples of what is not (with links to other projects which would accept these articles). Also, links should be made to external web sites with related content, and then a link to the main project page. Someone wishing to write an article which doesn't quite fit with the guidelines could either start a new project devoted to that type of article, or request on the discussion page for a change to the guidelines so that the wiki can accept their article (maybe this could be done in a similar way to votes for deletion).

Tristrom Cooke 12:19 9 Feb 2005

Blanked content, added a link to the proper project page

This is a technical project. It already has a project page. I'd prefer not to split the discussion into a bunch of places. Please discuss Labs on the mediawiki project page.--Ryan Lane (talk) 23:45, 11 October 2012 (UTC)