Participants: JohnAbbe, PanSola, StevenWalling, PhoebeAyers

We reviewed what SisterSites is, and then focused mostly on MediaWiki / Wikipedia. (An example of SisterSites would be if this page had automatically generated links to the SisterSites pages of earlier RecentChangesCamp wikis - instead of having to add those links manually, as they appear below under “Also see”. WardsWiki has it - at the bottom of http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?StartingPoints you see links to the StartingPoints pages of the wikis that Ward has chosen to sister to.)

BrionVibber has done a lot of the work necessary to have it in MediaWiki. It would be a big deal to turn it on for Wikipedia as a whole, but another option we came up with is for there to be a subpage for Users that lets them specify sister wikis they'd like to see links to, and write some JavaScript that people could add for themselves that would add a SisterSites box in their sidebar. PanSola was interested, and may work on it later this year.

(This individual approach could also be done separate from any particular wiki software, via GreaseMonkey.)

Why hasn't it spread more? Two possible answers:

• Fear of giving eyeballs away to other websites
• Chicken and egg problem that implementing it on your wiki software doesn't help you link to other wiki software until they also implement it

Also see:

• http://2006.recentchangescamp.org/SisterSites2006
• http://2007.recentchangescamp.org/SisterSites
• http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?SisterSitesImplementationGuide