Incubator:Policy/First draft

This page is kept for historical interest. Any policies mentioned may be obsolete. If you want to revive the topic, you can use the talk page or start a discussion on the community portal.

There is a draft proposal for a more useful policy here.

What is Wikimedia Incubator?

• Multilingual
• For testing new languages
• For testing new projects

What Wikimedia Incubator is not

A place to host content similar to pages on other Wikimedia projects

This is for experimentation that can't happen elsewhere, usually due to policy restraints. If the content you are contributing can go to one of the current Wikimedia sister projects, it will not only recieve a much larger audience but has administrators to help you with organizing your contributions much better than we can do here. Although reasonable efforts will go to relocating the content that is misplaced on Wikimedia Incubator, you should be aware that your contributions might end up being deleted anyway, even if accidentally.

A web hosting service

We don't have the resources to be able to host any and all types of personal content, including blog entries, resumes, and other personal essays. Formal policies exist for creating a new project and should be followed. Please don't add content to the various projects hosted at Incubator that is inconsistant with their proposal mission statement.

A soapbox for personal essays

There are many forums available on the internet at many sites that are available to post personal political opinions on many topics. The projects hosted through Incubator are for those ideas that will have a reasonble likelyhood of becoming a full Wikimedia sister project.

How does a New Test Get Created on Wikimedia Incubator?

New Language Proposals

It should be noted that Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia Foundation encourage the development of existing Wikimedia projects in additional written languages beyond those currently serviced by existing Wikimedia projects. This wiki in particular was established specifically to test the viability of new language projects, and if you can read and write in a language not currently in use by a particular Wikimedia project, please make a suggestion using the following guidelines:

1. Create a new test request to explain your motivation for adding this language.
2. A general interest vote would occur by interested participants to demonstrate project viability.
3. Once 5 participants say that they would support the project, a test is created.

New Wikimedia Project Proposals

New project proposals will be created here after being approved by the Foundation at Meta.

Wikimedia Incubator Culling Policy

• Projects will be "terminated" when significant activity in the project has ceased, by monitoring the number of new edits over a period of time. Generally speaking, if there hasn't been any significant new activity for more than a year it will be considered "inactive" and removed from the front page of Wikimedia Incubator and added to a list of inactive projects.

• Projects that have been "approved" as a formal Wikimedia sister project will have content transwikied to the new wiki, and redirect links on Wikimedia Incubator to the new project, as can be done technically with the MediaWiki software.

• Projects that remain inactive for a considerable period of time may be completely deleted.

• Any user can nominate a test for deletion, and it will be voted upon.