User:Sm8900/Wikinotes

main proposal
I would like to propose a new pagee to be called WikiCafe. it would be a place where wikiprojects could talk to each other, exchange ideas, let each other know about upcoming online meetups, editing drives, etc, etc. if you support this, please comment and let me know. I would like to propose this at Village Pump sometime in the next few weeks. I cannot do so, though, unless I know I have some basis of support for doing this. thanks! --Sm8900 (talk) 23:51, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Feedback, ideas, suggestions, requested revisions
I mentioned this at the Zoom meetup, but this idea seems either duplicative of existing resources, or not likely to be useful or to happen. If it's just general chatter, there's the Village Pump already for that. If it's inter-Wikiproject collaboration, the actual Wikiproject pages are the place to do it, occasionally creating subpages as needed specifically for it. (For example, WP:MILHIST and WP:VG had a collab for awhile where they shared A-Class reviews among each other.). If it's a "cafe" for social chatter - that's basically a recreation of WP:Esperanza, which was shut down by the community after various problems, and I think is very unlikely to be revived. SnowFire (talk) 00:39, 23 April 2020 (UTC)
 * hi . thanks for your reply. okay, that information is very helpful. I did have a look around there. I found this old version of the coffee house there. so I do see what you are referring to. I will give this all some thought. thanks!! --Sm8900 (talk) 01:48, 23 April 2020 (UTC)

If we're looking for "a place where wikiprojects could talk to each other", this might be a good idea. But I think Discord or IRC might be a better venue for other general chitchat, as I think may have mentioned in the text chat. Both of these platforms have the benefit of being live-chat platforms. epicgenius (talk) 18:07, 23 April 2020 (UTC)


 * So, is what we want a place for Wikiprojects to talk to each other? WikiProject Council claims to be about that. Is it much used? Besides millions of lightly used talk pages and subpages for articles and users, there are a great many on-wiki forums, some of them quite busy, others perennially idle. Many were created because existing forums were too busy. Others were started with the hope of gathering matters that were being pootly addressed by scattered, low-traffic individual forums. This seems to be motivated more by the latter theory than the former, but under either theory I think the purpose should be more precisely defined. Off-wiki forums (FB, mailing lists, IRC) have various advantages, including that their software is specifically designed for discussion. And of course they have the disadvantage of being off-wiki. Jim.henderson (talk) 17:30, 24 April 2020 (UTC)


 * To date Jim, I don't think I have heard of the Wikiproject Council coordinating any cross-project chats. A live-chat platform may be a lot better, anyway, since it has the ability for instant responses. But like you said, the live chat is off-wiki, and users can't look into the chat logs of something like Discord unless they have an account. epicgenius (talk) 20:49, 24 April 2020 (UTC)


 * If a forum has already been set up but isn't used much, a new one for approximately that purpose is unlikely to get more use. Sophisticated internal forums for which all Wikimedians are automatically registered, providing services like those of external social media and video conferencing sites, might be a very useful thing, if someone could make that happen. But of course, WMF hasn't anything like the money of Google Chat or Reddit to make sophisticated proprietary software, and we depend quite strictly on open software, so it isn't likely. I mean, a fairly simple thing, a better Talk Page editor, has been starting, stalling, stopping, restarting in a different direction, and stalling again, for years.
 * Grr, I wrote this in Visual Editor, and it ignored my indenting and signature. It's crummy software, at least for this purpose but maybe a little research can turn up the correct way to indent and sign.Jim.henderson (talk) 11:36, 26 April 2020 (UTC)