Talk:Create a new Wikimedia wiki

new wikis and crats

"Your wiki will have at least one bureaucrat account, " ... This is not necessarily true. Many wikis run fine with Stewards performing the 'crat actions, and defacto policy seems to be that until there is enough community, having a local crat is possibly not a good thing. ++Lar: t/c 14:26, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Fixed - thanks FT2 ^{(Talk | email)} 15:57, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Actually, that is not really true for private wikis. :-) On most private wikis, you will need at least one bureaucrat to just create accounts. Cbrown1023 talk 20:56, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

If stewards can't access the wiki and change permissions, yes. I'm not sure which ones those are but your point is valid. ++Lar: t/c 21:42, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

I did a quick test. If the wiki is listed here I think stewards can at least SEE the permissions that users have via special:userrights. I did not try actually manipulating any, but I tried some private wikis I'm aware of and could see the permissions of various users. Thus, a steward could set themselves up as a 'crat, create the user, and turn 'crat off again. But that is terrifically cumbersome so I absolutely agree with you as far as practicality goes. ++Lar: t/c 21:49, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Is this information still valid

Hi, I am a team member of Wikimedia Armenia and I wander if this page is still valid. Eg. can we request an internal wiki for our team? --vacio 12:10, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Proposed point 0.

0. It's forbidden.

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Private wikis should all be merged to one or two existing private wikis. --Nemo 08:08, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

I tend to agree - but I've been told by Ops that isn't a policy so much as a group preference. I suppose we could remove mention of private wikis from this page (keep in mind it talks about more than just private wikis) - but given this would be the process for any possible new private wikis (say a new committee is created) - I'm not sure it is worth the confusion of taking it out. Also, there are a couple dozen private wikis - not just one or two. I did this update by request after some affiliates were coming to us about setting up new public wikis for their orgs. We've asked Reedy to review it for accuracy on the process aspects. Varnent (talk)^(COI) 13:54, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

You get a good point Nemo here. Creating private wikis requiring resources taken from the community without any monitoring of why it exists and needs resources, and what happens there, is definitely a bod idea.

However I disagree with the idea of merging them: they are closed for good reasons and merging would cause problems of confidentiality. This does not mean that all these wikis need to remain active. They can be closed and archived privately (access to their data will remain severely controled, or impossible for as long as require by laws for confidential data; may be even a part of this data will need to be destroyed completely to avoid the risk of disclosure which could violate international agreements).

But closed wikis needed to complete a job whose need has been discussed publicly, is unaviodable if there's a need to preserve privacy/confidentially to protect the legitimate rights of others (their personal life, their job position, their sesual orientation, their religion, their commercial intererests, their bank position and payments or credit card info, or other legally protected data... i.e. everything that does not fall in the public mission of Wikimedia but whose presence in some discussion may be needed in a restricted area to solve some real problems without sharing the details with unconcerned people).

For some cases, if there are lots of data to protect, requiring too many people to work on them, it will still be needed to separate things and avoid that every admin or authorized people working on a specialized wiki (or other web service and suorted database backends and servers) having access to data that does not fall in its own job. Private data will need to be separated in multiple entities managed separately. But this has a cost and merging this into a single server could expose "sensible" data to too many people. For now only the OTRS system (and in the internal data needed to protect donors) requires a dedicated structure which has an important pat kept closed and secret for good reasons, but still with a positive return for the long term security of the much wider open projects. Also the millions dollars collected each year are spent responsibly and it's good to see that the Foundation does not requests more than what it needs for effective projects and for securing them for enough years so that these assets are not exposed to legal or fiscal problems.

It's remarkable to see how the movement is self-controled with lots of delegation of powers (including internationally with so many legal differences) and mutual controls without someone deciding for everything without beng accountable to the community for his actions. This allows creativity that spans much more than the Wikipedia projects themselves; in term of development and education, the core mission of the movement. It's also remarkable that the movment accepts also a high leve of autocritics and stills allows new projects to be created and developed. And that the Foundation recognizes diversity in its movement by different models of organizations and a constant evolution of its own policies, essentially driven by hearing the volunteers. And that the movement also accepts to be evaluated psitively and negatively without hiding the problems we still don't solve correctly but for which there's ample space for innovation and experimentation to see how we could do things better or more simply or just to adapt ourselves to the (political, economical, social and technical) evolutions of the world.

We call this good "governance". We know that tomorrow will be different (not necessarily better, so things will be lost but others will be gained). More generally Wikimedia is part of a larger movement "OpenData" and it's also good to recognize that Wikimedia is also not alone and that there are other organizations trying to develop it; more or less successfully (but not always with a high level for opening their own decision processes to more people). verdy_p (talk) 22:10, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

Of course my proposal is to merge each (WMF) private wiki to a separate namespace of, say, internal or officewiki, access to which is granted to the same users who had previously access to the merged wiki. See Talk:Wikimedia wikis. --Nemo 08:11, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Page rename

As discussed at Talk:Create new wiki and at User talk:Martin Urbanec/Archives/2021#Create new wiki, there is a desire to rename this page to avoid the confusing keyword "internal", and to make it easier to find. The last suggestion there was to rename it to Create a new wiki.

Are there any further comments, or different name-suggestions, before we do so? (The page has existing-translations, a subpage, and incoming redirects, so it would be good to avoid multiple renames).

Pinging @Martin Urbanec, Pols12, and GZWDer: as previous commenters. Cheers, Quiddity (talk) 01:10, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

I fully support moving to Create a new wiki, as the current name does not represent the page's purpose. Martin Urbanec (talk) 07:41, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

The Wikimedia name should still be there to prevent people from mixing up with creating a generic MediaWiki wiki. Leaderboard (talk) 20:15, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

Now done. Quiddity (talk) 01:48, 29 October 2021 (UTC)