Community

(English) This is an essay. It expresses the opinions and ideas of some Wikimedians but may not have wide support. This is not policy on Meta, but it may be a policy or guideline on other Wikimedia projects. Feel free to update this page as needed, or use the discussion page to propose major changes.

This page is about community, about interactions between users through wiki projects. Formerly this page opened with the question, "Is Wikipedia really a community?" Now, the situation is much broader.

This obsolete diagram shows not-Wikipedia projects as part of the Wikipedia community. It is obsolete because such projects attract users who are not from Wikipedia, and users who contribute much more to those projects than they do to Wikipedia.

This is an attempt to show a Wikimedia community partitioned into different projects, perhaps ignoring that some users contribute to multiple projects.

Users from en.wikipedia, de.wikipedia, and fr.wikipedia effectively own the 2004 Board election. Click image to zoom.

Wikibooks and partition

Wikibooks is a special case. The project divides itself into multiple, autonomous book projects. English Wikibooks, in particular, is lacking a mechanism to repel new book projects that are outside the scope of Wikibooks, given by a official enforced policy.

Wikisource likes uniformity: a single standard Header template on English Wikisource introduces most texts.

Can the Wikipedia community become a Wikimedia community?

It is already so. For example, we have IRC channel cloaks for different Wikimedia projects, and we also have "wikimedia/" cloaks. At least on Freenode, we can have a Wikimedia community.

See also

• The Wikipedia Community
• False community
• IRC channels
• Image:Election participation2.png image showing "community"