Wikiscope

This is a **proposal for a new** Wikimedia sister project.
Wikiscope
Status of the proposal
Status	under discussion
Details of the proposal
Project description	A viewer-based wiki that is a Wikimedia project coordination.
Technical requirements
	v; t; e;

Wikiscope is a project proposal geared towards viewer-based Wikimedia project coordination.

Its mission is to make a viewer-based, easy to use coordination project which showcases and makes accessible all of the various Wikimedia projects.

Proposal

At the moment, there are several great Wikimedia projects, in many languages. I'm sure that you are familiar with all of them. However, the average user of, say, Wikipedia, does not know about some of these. They may be dimly aware of Wiktionary, but they often do not realise there are such things as Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikispecies, Wikiquote etc.

This ought to be remedied. This is not a proposal for a new project as such, but rather a viewer-based coordination site which showcases all the projects.

Viewers would come to the page and it would give them a view similar to the current English Wikipedia homepage. This would have the current featured articles/books/quotes from the various projects together. There would be a search function which would allow easy search through all the projects.

"So far, so good. But what about pages? This can't just be a Main Page, can it?" I hear you ask. No, I reply, it isn't. There are pages just like on the normal wikis. However, they do not have content, but links. Each page will represent a topic, such as "History of World War II", "Works by Shakespeare" and so on. The pages will be interlinked with each other and, more importantly, with the main projects. A page on "Works by Shakespeare" will link the viewer to Wikisource, for texts, to Wikipedia, for information, to Wikiquote, for quotes, and so on.

There would be language-specific versions of the project (as with others) which would do the same thing. They would, of course, link to each other.

I realise that this will require a lot of work, and I don't know if it is technically feasible (to have the featured page of one wiki appear automatically on another, for example). However, I think that this project, if approved and created, would drastically improve the number of viewers to other projects, and the public perception of Wikimedia as a whole.

Justification

Projects other than Wikipedia are currently not very visible or noticed.
There is not enough inter-project linking.
It is often hard to find material on a topic without knowing what to search for.
Inter-project linking solely based on an existing project will be less successful and will dilute the project it is on.

Key Features

Simple topic headings.
Links to information on all Wikimedia projects.
Main Page which showcases the best off each project.
Interwiki links to other language Wikiscope pages.

Glossary

viewer = a person who just uses and does not contribute to a Wikimedia project
user = a person who contributes to a Wikimedia project
project = a Wikimedia project (Wikipedia, Wiktionary etc.)
proposal = a project which has not been yet made official
inter-project link = a link between two projects
interwiki link = a link between to languages in a project
interlink = a link from one page to another in a project

Discussion

Please discuss the idea as a whole on the talk page.
Naming for the proposal should be discussed at Wikiscope/Name.
Discussion about existing similar ideas should be made at Wikiscope/Others.
Technical aspects of the project can be discussed at Wikiscope/Technical.

Proposed by

Daniel

Alternative names

(see Wikiscope/Name)

Wikiscope
Wikiview
Wikiwatch
Wikshelf
Wikicue

Related projects/proposals

Wikshelf

Domain names

en.wikiscope.org
de.wikiscope.org
etc.

Mailing list links

June 2006

Demos

Ancient Egypt
The Simpsons
안녕 자두야 - non-English demo article