User:Amire80/Wiki creation process

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The process of creating a new Wikimedia wiki is highly manual. It consists of many steps that must be done by multiple people. Some of them are very technical, and some are more social.

This document is based on several community-maintained wiki pages with guides and policies. Among them:

It is also based on the author’s personal experience with some less well-documented areas.

The extensive footnotes give some background information that may be useful for some people, but reading them is optional.

This document deals only with creation of wikis of an existing project family, for example, an edition of Wikipedia, Wikisource, or Wiktionary in a new language. Creation of a brand-new kind of project is more complicated and requires a Board decision. The only new kinds of projects that were created since 2010 are Wikivoyage,^[1] Wikidata, and Wikifunctions.

The sequence of the steps is only a recommendation, and is not strict. All the steps that require completion of other steps are explicitly marked as such. Many steps can be done in a different sequence, or in parallel, most notably the localization of the most important messages on translatewiki and the writing of the articles in the Incubator.

Mini-glossary for the table:

Language committee : A group of Wikimedia volunteers with a mandate from the WMF Board to approve the creation of a new wiki. See Language committee on Meta.
Language community : A group of people who know a language and want to write a wiki in it, as a whole or each of its members. It includes the Leader.
Leader : A member of a Language community, who is doing most of the work of communicating with the Language committee and the wider Wikimedia community, finding more community members, organizing events, creating first articles and policy pages, etc. This role is not defined formally or technically, but usually such a person emerges early in the process. Sometimes it’s more than one person, and the role may also move from one person to another over time. The division between the Leader and the Language community is not strict.
Importer : A Wikimedian who has the technical privileges and the tools to import numerous pages from one wiki to another.
Server maintainers : Wikimedia volunteers and WMF and WMDE staff people who have access to the shell and skills to perform technical actions to create and configure a domain and a MediaWiki instance.


Performer	Description
Leader	Understand what the project is. This may sound too obvious or generic, but actually, it happens surprisingly often that people don’t completely understand what “a Wikipedia” or “a Wiktionary” is. For example, people sometimes think that “a Wikipedia” is one of the following things: a Wikipedia article a dictionary a website (that is something other than an encyclopedia) It’s actually conceivable that Wikimedia will some day provide infrastructure for all kinds of other free knowledge websites that are not dictionaries and general encyclopedias, but this is not the situation now, so it is mentioned as an explicit step.
Leader	Understand the central principles of Wikimedia and its wikis: Vision: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. What a wiki is: A website that anyone can edit. Read the article Wiki in the Wikipedia in English or in another language. Free licenses. Read the article Free-culture movement and the articles to which it links (free content, etc.) in Wikipedia in English or in another language. Read the Universal Code of Conduct.
Language community	Create a Meta account (if you don’t have one already).
Language community	Shouldn’t be necessary, but in practice, often is: Request Global IP block exemption for people who want to edit the Incubator.^[2]
Language community	Optional, but recommended: Gain some experience with editing a similar project in another language in which you can read and write. For example, if you want to start a new Wikipedia, try editing Wikipedia in English, Russian, French, Indonesian, or some other language: make a user page, create main namespaces pages, edit pages, use talk pages, upload photos, read policy pages, participate in community discussion about notability, deletion, policy, etc.^[3]
Language community	Optional, but recommended: Improve the Wikipedia article about the language in English and in other languages. As it usually is in Wikipedia, base all your edits on reliable sources: dictionary books, grammar books, history books, articles in sociolinguistics journals, etc.^[4]

Footnotes edit

↑ Partly adapted from the external Wikitravel website.
↑ Many of the new languages are spoken in African countries and in India. Many ISPs in these countries use IP addresses that Wikimedia stewards identify as open proxies, and block them, even though the people who connect from them are not necessarily vandals. See Talk:No open proxies/Unfair blocking for details.
↑ While this step is optional, it is, in fact, one of the most useful and important in practice. In the 2000s, people who were starting a Wikipedia in a new language often had editing experience from another major language, as well as understanding of content policies, free licenses, “What Wikipedia is Not”, etc. This is no longer true in the 2020s—most people are familiar with Wikipedia as readers, but not necessarily as editors.
↑ This helps Language committee members and translatewiki.net administrators make informed decisions. Particularly helpful sections to improve: Orthography; History; Usage (Literature, Education, Media, etc.); Bibliography.

[1] Partly adapted from the external Wikitravel website.

[2] Many of the new languages are spoken in African countries and in India. Many ISPs in these countries use IP addresses that Wikimedia stewards identify as open proxies, and block them, even though the people who connect from them are not necessarily vandals. See Talk:No open proxies/Unfair blocking for details.

[3] While this step is optional, it is, in fact, one of the most useful and important in practice. In the 2000s, people who were starting a Wikipedia in a new language often had editing experience from another major language, as well as understanding of content policies, free licenses, “What Wikipedia is Not”, etc. This is no longer true in the 2020s—most people are familiar with Wikipedia as readers, but not necessarily as editors.

[4] This helps Language committee members and translatewiki.net administrators make informed decisions. Particularly helpful sections to improve: Orthography; History; Usage (Literature, Education, Media, etc.); Bibliography.

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