As of 2024, the new project proposals process is under review by the Wikimedia Foundation Board. You can still submit proposals, however please note that no new projects will be accepted until this review is complete.

• Hosting: Wikimedia Foundation is not a free hosting company. If your project does not fit theFoundation's ideals, downloadMediaWiki for free and install it on a server you control.Fandom (formerly Wikia),Miraheze, or otherwiki farms are also options, but come at the cost of partially losing control of your project.
• Need a dedicated project? Think well. Maybe your proposal fits better into one of the existing projects, for example, Wikipedia, Wikibooks, or Commons?
• History: Individuals attempting to create a new project should read theWikipedia timeline.
• Be persistent. Don't take criticism personally. Some users are afraid of repeating mistakes from past projects. Going from an idea to a working wiki takes time and editing and sometimes software development. Be prepared for criticism; if it is a good idea, others will help you out!
• Demo: It may be useful to start a demo of the wiki along with the proposal. Demo wikis can be created atWikispore, which is aproposed wiki for seeding new WMF projects. You can also useFandom,ourproject.org, or any otherwiki farm.

The last project to be created wasWikifunctions in 2023. See the history ofthe project proposal page for Wikidata before it went live. The last one before that wasWikiversity in 2006. Some proposals below are suggesting adopting existing projects. The only time this has happened was whenWikitravel was forked asWikivoyage and integrated into theTravel guide proposal in 2013. Creating new projects is extremely rare but not impossible. Please consider if what you are proposing is really a new type of information or educational project that cannot fit within the scope of existing projects.

see also theComplete list of Wikimedia projects

Some common proposals could be merged into one of these as asubproject:

• Wikipedia has manyWikiProjects. Your proposal could be one, or part of one.
• Wikisource hasWikiProjects for primary sources and historical documents.
• Wikibooks hosts some collections:Wikijunior (children's books), and theCookbook.

Other content projects may be a good fit for what you have in mind:

• Wikinews (collaborative journalism)
• Wikimedia Commons (images & media)
• Wikispecies (taxonomic database)
• Wikiquote (quotations)
• Wiktionary (dictionary and thesaurus)
• Wikiversity (educational materials)
• Wikivoyage (travel guide)
• Wikidata (data repository)
• Incubator wiki (new language editions of most Wikimedia projects; seeBeta Wikiversity andMultilingual Wikisource for those projects)

1. Create anaccount and a user page on this wiki, so people can address questions to you.
2. Create a page describing your plan: enter the project name in the box below and click the button.
3. Link to your proposal from this page, below.
4. Advertise your project! Good places to do so are on theWikimedia Forum and thewikimedia-l mailing-list.

There was aproposed reform of new project process and aproposed community committee to develop a clear policy and documentation for sister project proposals, both of which are currently inactive. Thede facto process is described below:

1. Any proposal may only be approved by theBoard of Trustees after a prominent discussion process and a broad and clear consensus (dozens and probably hundreds of supports are needed, and the proposal may be open for years)
2. Any users in good standing may close or merge any proposal if:
   • it is clearly redundant to another project or project proposal, or is not a serious or intelligible proposal— i.e. jokes, trolling, proposals with extremely vague scope, and patent nonsense (tag "Procedurally closed");
   • it is stale and has few support after a considerable amount of time (tag "Stale");
   • it clearly has no consensus after a considerable amount of time (tag "Rejected").

Unless your proposal involves new features that the MediaWiki software currently doesn't have, you may incubate your proposal inWikispore, an unofficial project to develop test wikis.

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• Proposals
• Proposed projects