Lydia Pintscher

Tags	Collaboration, Wikidata
Primary Session	Next Steps for Languages and Cross Project Collaboration
Secondary Sessions

Breaking Down Barriers To Cross-Project Collaboration

"... a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge."

Wikipedia has been our flagship for many years now and our main means of achieving our vision. As information consumption and expectations of our readers are changing, Wikipedia needs to adapt. One crucial building block for this adaption is re-using and integrating more content from the other Wikimedia projects and other language versions of Wikipedia. Connecting our projects more is vital for helping especially our smaller communities serve their readers. Surfacing more content from the other Wikimedia projects also gives them a chance to shine, find their audience and do their part in sharing in the sum of all knowledge.

This integration comes with a lot of challenges. Over many years the Wikipedias have lived largely independent from each other and the other Wikimedia projects. This is changing. Sharing and benefiting for example from data on Wikidata means collaborating with people from potentially very different projects, speaking different languages. It brings a perceived loss of local control. Editors see them-self first and foremost as editors of "their" Wikipedia at the moment and often don't perceive this integration as worth the effort - especially on the larger projects.

We need to address this on both the social and technical level if we want to bring our projects closer together and have them benefit from each other's strength and compensate their weaknesses.

We need to think about and find answers to these questions: What can we do in order to bring our projects together more closely? How can we help break down perceived and real barriers for cross-project work? What can we do to make cross-project collaboration easier?