How to request a new category or closed group on Space

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Women_of_the_Wall_talking_with_Kotel_women.jpg

So you want to bring your community conversations to Wikimedia Space, but your topic doesn’t fit in any of the categories. Or maybe you want to create a new closed group, with its own private category, for collaboration. Great, let’s talk about setting up a place for you. 

To request a new category or closed group, open a conversation in the #About Wikimedia Space category, using the “categories” or “groups” tag, with the following information:

1. Proposed name of category/group. Make sure your name is descriptive and specific to the area of interest.
2. Proposed text for the “About” post of the category/group. Examples: About the Regional Coordination category, About the Translation category.
3. Proposed position within category system. Is it its own standalone category? Should it be a subcategory of a category that already exists? Should it be a parent category of a category that already exists? Note that groups come with private discussion categories, so this applies to closed groups as well.

Once your category is created, there may be some additional factors you’d like to consider.

Category/group moderatorship: Space allows for general site moderators (who gain moderatorship by moving up organically in trust levels and expressing interest) as well as category and group-specific moderators. All category and group moderators will be granted Trust Level 4 so that they can access the range of moderator tools: responding to flags, splitting topics, merging topics, closing topics, pinning topics, etc. You can nominate moderators for your category or group at any time. 

Reply by email: You may want to enable reply by email for the category or group, to allow users to respond to posts without having to visit the site. This will depend on the preferences of the user base.

Adding tags: With use, you may realize that there are missing tags corresponding to the category or group’s subject matter. Users with Trust Level 3 and above can create tags, so feel free to reach out to the category moderator (if you have one) or to any site moderator to create new tags at any time.

Configuring notifications: To ensure you’re notified about any new content posted in the category or group, click on that category or group from the Discuss Space main page, click the circle icon on the upper right-hand corner, and set it to “Watching”. You can invite other participants to do the same. 

We look forward to hosting your community discussions!