A collaboration involves a single article, chosen by editors working in the group doing the collaboration, where editors work on that article for a week, fortnight, or month, and then turn to the next chosen article.
You can see the list of existing collaborations at Wikipedia:Collaborations (shortcut: WP:CO), as shown in Figure 9-7.
Figure 9-7. Here’s the top of the list of collaborations as of July 2008. At the time, about 30 collaborations were considered active.
Some collaborations involve several WikiProjects, and some are separate entities unconnected to any WikiProject. But most collaborations occur within an existing WikiProject. One reason is that recruiting new members to a collaboration can be difficult, since collaborations don’t post templates on large numbers of article talk pages, as WikiProjects do.
Another factor in favor of single-WikiProject collaborations is the process for selecting a new article to collaborate on: Editors whose articles aren’t chosen for collaboration may give up, while editors who do continue to push for a particular article to be the subject of the collaboration may find that when it’s chosen, hardly anyone else wants to work on it. Drawing participation from a single WikiProject can minimize or compensate for such problems, since project members have a high interest level, and new members are always joining.
The process for starting a new collaboration is basically to create a new page with details about what you have in mind, and then advertise it. You’ll find full details in the “Creating a new collaboration” section at WP:CO.
Given the challenges of keeping the interest of editors, think twice before creating a collaboration outside a WikiProject. Rather, if you’re a member of a WikiProject, test out the waters by posting a note on the talk page of that project. If you get only one or two other editors who show interest, perhaps you can collaborate informally, and try again in a few months, when you can point to a couple of successes.
You might want to start a new collaboration as a monthly thing, rather than weekly. That gives you and the other editors more time to make progress. Also, you might want to focus on articles that are relatively short, and not the subject of any ongoing editing battles. That increases the chances of substantial results.