This is not a final decision yet, so I plan to immediately place this task on hold. However, I want to start understanding the best way to go through some of the steps of this, because if the decision actually goes final, we are going to need to do this in stages. In particular:
- Stage 1 (as early as today): We stop general editing access to the wiki. Before things go further than that down the road, though, we have one contributor (currently a sysop there) who will delete certain pages per a previous RfD, as well as some other pages that are either probable copyvios or out of scope. The reason this needs to be done, even given a future deletion/redirection, is that Russian Wikinews is talking about incorporating at least some of this content. So if they wish to do that, I'd like the content to be reasonably policy-clean first. I don't know whether the best way to do this is (a) have stewards full-protect the entire project and withdraw sysop rights from everyone except the one sysop who will do the corrections, (b) close/lock the project from here, but leave sysop editing access intact, and have the stewards withdraw sysop rights from everyone except the one sysop, (c) close/lock the project from here outright, but have the stewards grant the one user rights to edit over the lock (local steward right, interface admin, whatever), or (d) close/lock the project from here, and have the one user instruct the stewards as to what to do there (less efficient, but perhaps resulting in fewer "unusual" exceptions to be made).
- Stage 2: As soon as that is done, fully close the project and create an xml archive.
- Stage 3: Reasonably soon after that, as soon as any lingering issues are known to be resolved, redirect all url's within the project to a single landing page containing only the closure notice, with the rest of the project effectively hidden from the outside world.